Compelling Events for Automation• Middleware Upgrades It’s great when new vendors

bring out new features - but often taking advantage of them takes a good deal of time and effort to upgrade the new infrastructure - and introduces risk. Automating the upgrade project speeds it up, reduces the risk and builds a more manageable platform in the future.

• Migrating off ‘Premium Product’ With the economy as it is, more organizations are forced to tighten their belts, and one area that has come under particular scrutiny is the annual cost of maintaining installed software. Some organizations have made the decision to move less business critical applications off more expensive middleware onto open-source platforms such as JBoss and Tomcat. This type of project is accelerated when it’s automated and an automation tool makes managing hybrid or heterogeneous environments much easier.

• Building a PAAS or a private cloud With pressure on businesses to deliver more innovation to their customers, faster, we see many of our customers building Platforms As A Service and private clouds. These are a lot faster and quicker to set up using an automation tool, and a lot quicker to manage demand once they are up and running.

• Core business application upgrades or migrations Many of our customers occasionally need to upgrade or even replace their core business applications - often complex, multi-layered, integrated systems that have evolved over time and have many integration points and are absolutely critical to the minute by minute operations of the business. Using an automation tool can reduce the risk and time associated with such a project.

• Platform migrations Sometimes it’s time to move from one platform to another - for instance, customers sometimes feel that a UNIX based platform will

WebLogic Insights• WebLogic Application Server is a complex,

highly configurable product with literally thousands of interrelated configuration items. The RapidDeploy™ WebLogic plugins support deployment of code (in the form of ear/war files) and configuration to the WebLogic domain.

• The plugin includes tasks to install and patch WebLogic binaries on target server.

• The plugin includes modules for snapshotting all configuration items in a WebLogic domain for comparison over time to highlight configuration drift. The exported configuration may also be templated and used as the basis to re-import to this, or another, WebLogic domain. Snapshotting may be achieved by either file based or JMX methodologies.

• The plugin also includes modules for WebLogic configuration and code deployment via a Python scripting framework. This allows for an application, its mappings and WebLogic configuration items to be deployed in an idempotent way (The deployment always brings the target up to the desired state). All common configuration items are supported in a simple to understand and use way.

• It is easy, for example, to set a cluster count and topology with a couple of configuration lines, instead of the (potentially) thousands of lines that would be needed using an xml export definition. Then, to create a package to increase the cluster count by one cluster member on each node in the topology is a single character change to the configuration file. This will be rolled out and updated automatically on the next deployment to this environment, along with any other code and configuration changes bundled into this package. Packages can be rolled forwards and back as required.

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Rapiddeploy™ provides organizations with Application Release Automation capabilities to reduce costs, improve productivity and time to value and assure compliance. There is a range of plugins available to extend the core automation framework capabilities to most available platforms and perform integrations throughout the devops toolchain. This datasheet refers to the WebLogic plugin.

Plugins are downloaded through the Plugin Manager console in RapidDeploy™, or from the MidVision website at www.midvision.com.

offer them performance advantages over an OS400 platform. But moving hundreds of middleware applications might seem like a challenge too far - without automation.

• Rearchitecting Change is a constant and businesses need to continually evolve their IT infrastructure and operations, build new environments for things like Disaster Recovery and automating the build and deployment of these new environments means delivering them faster.

WebLogic plugin overviewThe WebLogic plugin for RapidDeploy™ enables you to automatically deploy and configure WebLogic application servers and applications. You can, all without the use of scripts:

• Take snapshots of your environments

• Detect configuration drift and compare environment configurations

• Create templates from your snapshots

• Promote them to create further downstream environments through which to deploy your EAR files based on this initial “golden” environment

WebLogic plugin TemplatesA ‘Create New’ template is available for environment creation from the edit/promote panel using the New Environment Definition function. This template is a great way to get started with the WebLogic Python deployment framework as it will create a deployment configuration file that you can either use straight away or tailor for your own use.

The WebLogic Template is:• WebLogic 11 Template - includes domain settings,

Admin Service configuration, Node Manager Machine configuration, Managed Servers, Clusters, File stores, JDBC stores and system Resources, JMS servers and system resources, and of course the deployable application(s) and their configuration

WebLogic plugin Tasks• WebLogicBinaryInstallTask - Deploy WebLogic binaries

• WebLogicBinaryPatchingTask - Patch webLogic binaries

• WebLogicBinaryUnInstallTask - Uninstall WebLogic binaries

• WebLogicDeploymentViaJythonTask - The Python deployment framework task

• DeployFileViaJmxTask - Deploy an ear/war via JMX

• UndeployFileViaJmxTask - UnDeploy an ear/war via JMX

• DeployConfigurationViaJmxTask - Deploying a previously exported (via JMX) snapshot

• StartDomainTask

• StopDomainTask

• StartManagedServerTask

• StopManagedServerTask

• DeployConfigurationTask - Deploying a previously exported (via file) snapshot

• OracleFusionMiddlewareFormsCompileTask

WebLogic plugin VersionsThe RapidDeploy™ WebLogic Plugin supports WebLogic 11G.

If you use a version of WebLogic that is not listed here and you would like to manage it using RapidDeploy™ please email sales@midvision.com with the details. For future versions, we aim to have support within two quarters of Oracle announcing general availability, although customer demand can accelerate our development roadmap.

plugins ship with:• A Library of commonly used tasks

• Wizards & extensive help information

• Predefined automation library elements

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Want this plugin? getting hold of it’s easy - either:1) Go to the Plugin Manager in your installation of RapidDeploy™ and pick your plugin from the list or

2) Go to www.midvision.com > Support > Downloads > RapidDeploy Plugin Downloads and select your plugin from there. If you have any problems, please call or email your MidVision Account Manager.

You must license your plugin separately - please speak to your MidVision Account Manager or email sales@midvision.com. If you are an IBM Rational Automation Framework customer and would like access to this plugin, please contact us at www.midvision.com.