In the past few months our engineering team has been working on installing and running the AquaLogic BPM Suite inside WebLogic Server 9.2 Virtual Edition 1.1, or simply WLS VE. The main goal of the exercise was to prove that our BPM engine could function properly in this new environment and address any required changes. Below you can see our VMWare ESX server configuration in the labs:
Virtualization is a hot topic and you may want to get all the details from the WLS VE page which includes several materials and white papers . There is a lot of good information available such as a customer case study, folks are running this stuff.
From ALBPM one of the main advantages on running inside WLS VE is around provisioning new systems. You can have a brand new ALBPM instance up and running in seconds, really. This is very good for large deployments and several provisioning use cases. A more real application of this technology is addressing "high pick loads" where new systems are needed for a certain period of time, but not the whole time. For example the week of April 15th is a pick time for the IRS. February 14th, Valentine's Day is a pick time for web based flower shops, you get the idea. In this case companies may need extra instances of ALBPM for those pick times. Next you can see our WLS VE instance running on VMWare ESX:
One thing to notice is what happens with the typical operating system. For example, in our case ALBPM was installed inside WLS VE, which in turn runs on the Liquid JVM, straight on top of VMWare ESX. This is very interesting and one of the things that got my attention on the topic. Below is an image I borrowed from the WLS VE product page to illustrate the point of the OS going away. :-)
So far we have been able to run the engine fine. We did have to update our license to include a tag for WLS VE, but for the most part of the effort everything has gone very well. Perhaps the part we invested the most time was to learn about WLS VE. We had to become familiar with the installation procedures as well as the deployment model on top of the new VE environment. Next image shows ALBPM running, deployed & active, on WLS VE.
Deployment is an area we will potentially improve over time so that customers can quickly provision images of AquaLogic BPM in their environment without too many clicks or via scripting. Right now it is a sequence of steps, which is fine, but not a "one-click" as I would like it to be. :)
You can get WLS VE now available from BEA. The current version of AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.0 is not certified on WLS VE yet, but you can still download and play with it. From the customer perspective this should work just like in any other deployment. We hope to bring official support to our matrix in the coming releases.
On a related note my friend Jesper, part of the BPM team, was able to create a ALBPM instance on the Amazon's EC2 environment. Check out the details in his blog.
Cheers,
--alex
PS: Don't forget to come and see us during BEA Participate 2008!
Technorati tags: BPM Business Process Management SOA BEA Virtualization
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