BEA WebLogic Operations Control: Application Virtualization for Enterprise Java

(1)

BEA WebLogic

®

_{Operations Control:}

Application Virtualization for

Enterprise Java

(2)

Copyright

Restricted Rights Legend

This software is protected by copyright, and may be protected by patent laws. No copying or other use of this soft-ware is permitted unless you have entered into a license agreement with BEA authorizing such use. This document is protected by copyright and may not be copied photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form, in whole or in part, without prior consent, in writing, from BEA Systems, Inc. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of BEA Systems. THE DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. FURTHER, BEA SYSTEMS DOES NOT WARRANT, GUARANTEE, OR MAKE ANY REPRESENTATIONS REGARDING THE USE, OR THE RESULTS OF THE USE, OF THE DOCUMENT IN TERMS OF CORRECTNESS, ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE.

Trademarks and Service Marks

Copyright 1995-2008, BEA Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. BEA, BEA AquaLogic, BEA eLink, BEA WebLogic, BEA WebLogic Portal, BEA WebLogic Server, Connectera, Compoze Software, Jolt, JoltBeans, JRockit, SteelThread, Think Liquid, Top End, Tuxedo, and WebLogic are registered trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. BEA Blended Application Development, BEA Blended Development Model, BEA Blended Strategy, BEA Builder, BEA Guardian, BEA Manager, BEA MessageQ, BEA microServices Architecture, BEA Workshop, BEA Workspace 360, Signature Editor, Signature Engine, Signature Patterns, Support Patterns, Arch2Arch, Arch2Arch Advisor, Dev2Dev, Dev2Dev Dispatch, Exec2Exec, Exec2Exec Voice, IT2IT, IT2IT Insight, Business LiquidITy, and Liquid Thinker are trademarks of BEA Systems, Inc. BEA Mission Critical Support, BEA Mission Critical Support Continuum, BEA SOA Self

Assessment, and Fluid Framework are service marks of BEA Systems, Inc. All other company and product names may be the subject of intellectual property rights reserved by third parties. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.

(3)

BEA White Paper – BEA WebLogic Operations Control

Overview

Many organizations are adopting virtualization technologies as part of their drive to increase utilization and reduce infrastructure costs, and at the same time improve their ability to respond rapidly to new line-of-business initiatives. Hypervisor-based virtualization platforms, such as VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure, have allowed them to consolidate their IT deployments onto a much-reduced number of servers running powerful multicore processors (for example, the Quad-Core Intel®_Xeon®_{7300 series) that now host multiple virtual machines}

run-ning applications in their own protected, virtualized environments. As a result, they have been able to optimize their physical infrastructure by pooling hardware and storage resources, reducing physical space, easing power and cooling costs, and improving application availability.

The focus is now shifting to application virtualization-technologies that help IT operations package, deploy, monitor, and control enterprise applications in these new virtual data centers to achieve flexible, dynamic oper-ations that are also more responsive, highly available, and efficient. BEA WebLogic Operoper-ations Control is a management framework for virtualized and non-virtualized enterprise Java applications that addresses the key challenges involved in application virtualization. BEA WebLogic Operations Control provides policy-based moni-toring of application service level agreements (SLAs) and automates the dynamic deployment and provisioning of application resources to ensure service-level objectives are met.

What is BEA WebLogic Operations Control?

BEA WebLogic Operations Control is an enterprise application virtualization product that enables centralized governance and control over Java applications, including dynamic activation and scale-out, to meet ever-changing, mission-critical business demands. With BEA WebLogic Operations Control, operations teams can define policies based on application-level SLAs that govern the allocation of hardware and software resources, ensuring that Quality of Service (QoS) goals are met across virtual and non-virtualized platforms. When prede-fined conditions occur, the BEA WebLogic Operations Control controller will dynamically allocate or de-allocate resources to applications or services by invoking the underlying infrastructure’s deployment capabilities. This lets customers take advantage of the huge increase in computing power that is now available through 7300-series Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, which can run many virtual machines simultaneously using VMware’s hypervisor-based virtualization technology. Applications can now be deployed on this pool of virtual resources and dynamically extended or reconfigured to meet runtime requirements without constant monitoring by sys-tem operators.

For example, if BEA WebLogic Operations Control is used to manage the deployment of large-scale Java EE applications running on VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure using BEA WebLogic Server®_{Virtual Edition, application}

administrators can set policies that govern how many servers must be available in a given domain, what the maximum load that those servers should support is, what response time is required for individual services, and other important SLA metrics. If any of these parameters is breached, BEA WebLogic Operations Control can be configured to respond immediately by provisioning further server instances, migrating existing instances to more suitable resources, or taking other actions to reconfigure the application’s runtime environment. BEA Weblogic Operations Control automatically maps application activity to the most appropriate resources of the underlying platform. This means that in a virtualized environment, BEA WebLogic Operations Control will invoke hypervisor-based services to clone, deploy, or migrate servers, while in a non-virtualized, OS-based environ-ment it can be configured to start additional resources wherever they have been defined.

(5)

What are the benefits?

BEA WebLogic Operations Control is a key component in the BEA vision for a flexible, dynamic architecture for enterprise Java virtualization, which aims to increase efficiency, simplicity, and control:

Efficiency. Hypervisor virtualization technology allows organizations to increase utilization through server consoli-dation, reduce data-center operating costs, and increase the flexibility and responsiveness of their IT operations. Simplicity. Preconfigured software appliances (such as BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition) remove installa-tion and configurainstalla-tion complexity, reduce software administrainstalla-tion costs, and speed up provisioning and deployment activities.

Control. Dynamic, policy-based resource allocation to applications and services, based on runtime behavior and application response monitoring, automates data-center operations and optimizes deployment architectures in real time.

BEA WebLogic Operations Control provides application-level monitoring and automation for all Java applica-tions, whether running virtualized or on a dedicated server. Most IT operations will contain a mixture of virtual and dedicated servers since not all applications can be effectively virtualized and in some cases, a mixed archi-tecture may be appropriate. With BEA WebLogic Operations Control, an organization can control and optimize its entire Java application estate, regardless of how and where those applications run, using a single manage-ment framework that is nonetheless able to take advantage of all the features of the underlying platforms. While next-generation hypervisor platforms such as VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure offer highly sophisticated capabilities for cloning, migrating, or restoring entire virtual machine (VM) environments, the hypervisor itself has limited visibility into what is happening within the VM at the application level. That limits its ability to reconfigure the underlying infrastructure dynamically, since it can only respond to events at the VM level, such as the avail-ability of system resources, storage, or network bandwidth. However, BEA WebLogic Operations Control is able to monitor applications’ runtime behavior at both the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and application-server layers, giving it access to a wealth of information about the application’s performance, health, and availability. Administrators can also use BEA WebLogic Operations Control to monitor and maintain priorities between appli-cation components and services, for example by starting additional instances to support the deployment of additional copies of a high-priority service.

Architecture

There are two main parts to the BEA WebLogic Operations Control software: the Controller and the Agents. These are built using the BEA microService Architecture™_{, an OSGi-based framework that provides a}

light-weight backplane for modular assembly of software services and standard interfaces for controlling component life cycles and dependencies.

The Controller maintains a secure repository of service deployments and SLA policies that it monitors, with a high-performance, customizable rules engine that lets system administrators specify what it should do when

(6)

those service levels are at risk. The Controller monitors JVM, Java Runtime Environment (JRE), service contain-er, and application metrics, and can also change configurations and provide Start/Stop/Suspend/Resume process control. This means that operations teams can automate key tasks aimed at maintaining application QoS, such as provisioning new server instances or migrating existing deployments to alternative hardware resources, based on how applications and their underlying SOA services behave at run time. The Controller can itself determine optimal resource placement for service deployments and JVM creations by matching serv-ice-deployment requirements with specific resource pool capabilities.

Action pipelines can be defined to initiate complex, sequenced activities in response to an event or condition, while calendar-based rules allow action scheduling on either a one-off or a periodic basis. Where appropriate, BEA WebLogic Operations Control can also be configured to require administrator adjudication before an action is initiated. The Controller can also surface alerts, notifications, and fault information using a variety of protocols including SMTP, SNMP, JMS, and JMX.

The Controller maintains a complete, aggregated view of all available resources and JVMs in the BEA WebLogic Operations Control management domain, providing a detailed dashboard view of the capabilities, performance, and resource usage of the domain’s virtualized and non-virtualized resources. This gives the administrator a single view of the runtime behavior and performance of his or her applications, the SOA services they are using, and the physical/virtual resources that these map to, even in a complex, partially or wholly virtualized application architecture. The customizable BEA WebLogic Operations Control Console provides fully interactive views of service and resource topologies, with health and monitoring visualization of services/JVMs/resources, to provide a dynamic, runtime view of an entire application domain. Full life-cycle and audit tracking are avail-able, as well as log and alert viewing.

The Agents manage the virtualized or non-virtualized resources that make up the application domain managed by BEA WebLogic Operations Control. These can be virtual appliances (such as BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition) running on hypervisor-based virtualization platforms, dedicated application servers, or JVM-based deployments. The Agent determines the managed resource environment’s resource capabilities and provides the appropriate process-control operations and platform-specific runtime information, using a pluggable, exten-sible architecture. The Agents collect and aggregate a rich variety of information about the resources and serv-ices they monitor, which they return to the Controller.

There are currently two types of Agent available: ESX Agent, which manages Java applications deployed as vir-tual appliances on VMware Virvir-tual Infrastructure (such as BEA WebLogic Server Virvir-tual Edition, which provides a full Java EE application-server environment inside a virtual machine, or other Java applications running on BEA LiquidVM™_{technology); and Plain Agent, which is used to manage non-virtualized BEA WebLogic Server}

instances or JVMs. The Controller and Agents determine automatically the capabilities of the environment for any given resource and map those to the policy-based activities configured by the administrator.

(7)

BEA WebLogic Operations Control deployment

architecture

Figure 1 shows an example deployment for BEA WebLogic Operations Control that illustrates the role of its main components’ architecture. In this example, the Controller is managing a domain with several BEA WebLogic Server instances, some running on dedicated servers with a standard OS-based software stack while others run as BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition appliances on VMware Virtual Infrastructure. The unique BEA LiquidVM JVM technology runs directly on the hypervisor without an operating system, enabling BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition to run as a true Java virtual appliance-and one that is optimized to take full advantage of virtualization-ready, 7300-series Quad-Core Intel®_Xeon®_processors.

The BEA WebLogic Operations Control Controller and Agents can run within virtual machines or on dedicated servers. In this example, the Controller runs on a dedicated server, as does the ESX Agent that manages the BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition instances running in virtual machines on the hypervisor. For virtualized server resources, process control and VM monitoring are done via VMware Virtual Center client API calls. The BEA WebLogic Server instances running on a non-virtualized, dedicated server are managed by a Plain Agent running on the same server. Both virtualized and non-virtualized resources in this example are monitored and controlled in a single BEA WebLogic Operations Control domain.

The BEA WebLogic Operations Control administrator has secure Web access to the BEA WebLogic Operations Control Console, which allows him or her to monitor the deployment remotely. The administrator may also man-age the VMware Virtual Infrastructure platform directly through the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client software.

4 F i g u r e 1

(8)

About BEA

BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA®_Enterprise

360˚, the industry’s most advanced SOA-based offering, is a comprehensive approach to delivering business results that includes technology, professional services, best practices, and world-class partners. Information about how BEA helps customers build a Liquid Enterprise™_{that transforms their business can be found at}

bea.com.

Join the BEA community

At BEA, we understand that developers need different kinds of resources than IT managers. And that architects face different challenges than executives. That’s why we’ve created four unique communities that give you exclusive access to a formidable group of your peers, to a world of shared thinking, and to the kind of meaningful information that can make you more effective and more competitive. To join one or more of the BEA communi-ties, simply register online at bea.com/register.

(9)

CWP1729E0208-1A BEA Systems, Inc.

2315 North First Street San Jose, CA 95131 +1.800.817.4232 +1.408.570.8000 bea.com