GlassFish For Business: Addressing your Deployment and Business Needs

The following White Paper is now available:

Title
Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server High Availability Reference Configurations for a Virtualized Environment

Publication Date
October, 2008

Summary
Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2 includes advanced high availability features that enable enterprises to deploy GlassFish in business-critical environments. This white paper provides valuable insights into possible reference topologies that meet a variety of deployment needs from a high availability perspective in a virtualized environment.

Additonal Notes
Leverages GlassFish, Solaris 10 Containers and Sun Fire T2000 servers.

Download
Download is free but requires registration; follow the Download Link. 13 Pages; PDF file is 241KB.

Last year Yael did a screencast that I reported in Installing a GlassFish Patch, an early entry in this blog. I recently noticed that the links provided in there no longer works; I suspect a change in mediacast but I didn't see the problem in a quick pass. Until when I can go make the old entry work, you can go directly to the entries as follows:

• Introduction
• How to Buy a Subscription Online
• How to Contact Sun Oline
• How to get Access to Patches
• How to Request Service Online

Caveat: These instructions represent the status of last year. I'll talk with Yael and the support team about how to get newer screencasts / slides for these tasks.

Caveat: I'm testing this entry on two different browsers, both on MacOS X. On Safari the links above work all the time. On FireFox 3, I need to reload the link. Sorry, don't have time to chase it up; specially since the presentation needs a content refresh.

The Enterprise-quality offerings from Sun for the Open Source GlassFish Server and MySQL Server are now available also in an Unlimited pricing model where the cost to the company is independent of the number of installed servers, used CPUs (or sockets), installed applications or customers served. The pricing depends on the quality of support (Standard for 5x12 or Premium for 7x24) and it comes in tiers depending on the size of the company (the bottom tier reaches up to 1K employees).

Details of the offer are available at:

• Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server (Home, Unlimited Pricing)
• MySQL Enterprise Server (Home, Unlimited Pricing)
• Overview of Unlimited Offer Overview and Press reactions.

(Note: The name change was originally announced on May 7th, 2008, during JavaOne 2008)

Sun's commercial distribution of the Open Source GlassFish Server has been renamed (Press Release) The new name Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server reflects more accurately the base of the distribution and will start appearing in future distributions. The old name (Sun Java System Application Server) will remain in some releases for a while.

The community/commercial relationship for the existing and (tentative) future releases is as follows:

• GlassFish v1 Family (Overview at GFB)
  • GlassFish v1 - Sun Java System Aplication Server 9.0
  • GlassFish v1 U1 - Sun Java System Application Server 9.0 U1

• GlassFish v2 Family (Overview at GFB)
  • GlassFish v2 - Sun Java System Application Server 9.1
  • GlassFish v2 U1 - Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 U1
  • GlassFish v2 U1 - Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 U2
  • GlassFish v2.1 - Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1 (tentative)

• GlassFish v3 Family (Overview@GFB)

For commercial patches refer to the family overview.

GlassFish v2 is Sun's second Open Source release of Sun's App Server, after GF v1 (SJS AS 9.0). The Sun branded distribution for GFv2 is Sun Java System Application Server 9.1.

GlassFish v2 includes a number of releases. Major releases use the "dot" terminology, starting with "2.0", then going to "2.1", etc. Minor public releases add a "U" for "Update Release".

All public releases also have an accompanying commercial, for-fee releases, but there are also sustaining releases only available thorugh our Enterprise Support for GlassFish - also see How to Install a Patch Screencast.

All patches are cumulative, i.e. fixes are accumulated in subsequent releases and the last digit in the release number often, but not always, matches its name. The "No-Cost" term denotes a free release, while the "Restricted" term denotes a commercial release.

The current releases are:

• SJS AS 9.1 (No-Cost - Sep 17th, 2007)
• SJS AS 9.1 U1 (No-Cost - Dec 19th, 2007)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 (No-Cost - Apr 29th, 2008)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 1 (Restricted - Jun 10th, 2008)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 2 (Restricted - Aug 1st, 2008)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 3 (Restricted - Sep 11th, 2008)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 4 (Restricted - Oct 30th, 2008)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 5 (Restricted - Dec 5th, 2008)
• GlassFish v2.1 (No-Cost - Jan 26th, 2009)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 6 - same as GF v2.1 (Restricted - Jan 26th, 2009)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 7 - same as GF v2.1 p1 (Restricted - Apr 2nd, 2009)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 8 - same as GF v2.1 p2 (Restricted - May 14th, 2009)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 9 - same as GF v2.1 p3 (Restricted - June 26th, 2009)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 10 - same as GF v2.1 p4 (Restricted - August 17th, 2009)
• SJS AS 9.1 U2 Patch 11 - same as GF v2.1 p5 (Restricted - September 25th, 2009)

In a graphical presentation:

As of this writing, the next planned GFv2 public release is GFv2.1.1 in Fall 2009. A list of entries related to roadmaps is available at Roadmap@TheAquarium.

Note This is a running entry and will be updated as new releases occur.

GlassFish v1 is Sun's first Open Source release of Sun's App Server; the corresponding Sun branded distribution is Sun Java System Application Server 9.0, reflecting many earlier, closed-source, releases of ancestors of this code base. The original release was aligned with the final release of Java EE 5.

All patches are cumulative, i.e. fixes are accumulated in subsequent releases and the last digit in the release number often, but not always, matches its name; e.g. -01 is "Patch 1", but note that -05 is "Patch 4"!

The "No-Cost" term denotes a free release, while the "Restricted" term denotes one only available through the for-fee subscription service, see Support Overview and How to Install a Patch Screencast

The releases and patches so far are:

• SJS AS 9.0 (No-Cost - May 2006)
• SJS AS 9.0 U1 (No-Cost - Oct 06)
• SJS AS 9.0 U1 Patch 1 (Restricted - Dec 14, 2006)
• SJS AS 9.0 U1 Patch 2 (Restricted - Jan 25, 2007)
• SJS AS 9.0 U1 Patch 3 (Restricted - Mar 22, 2007)
• SJS AS 9.0 U1 Patch 4 (Restricted - Oct 25, 2007)
• SJS AS 9.0 U1 Patch 5 (Restricted - Sep 15, 2008)

Note: Most customers should consider switching to the GlassFish v2-based releases (SJS AS 9.1) as they have improvements in functionality, reliability and performance.

Note: Many of the links above are forward links to entries that I will publish in the next day or two.

Added (on November 13th, 2008) - The links below no longer work. Check this Updated Entry for a workaround.

Yael has put together a screencast that shows how to get GlassFish Enterprise Support (see my previous post). The screencast covers the different portions of the experience, from buying subscription online to contacting Sun to installing the patches.

You probably want to start at the Top Page and use the left menu to navigate through the different sections. The top page starts with the introduction but give it a few sections to get started if you are in a slow connection.

• Introduction
• How to Buy Subscription Online
• How to Contact Sun Online
• How to get Access to Patches
• How to Request Service Online

Note: This is Yael's first screencast and I also did some editing to the configuration files while posting them here, so let us know if you see any issues and/or feedback and we will try to fix them. From where I'm at now (an internet cafe with slow connection), I already see:

• You should wait a few seconds for the image to get started in each segment
• Stop/Pause/Resume is either flakey or not working

Sun provides different types of GlassFish Support, including for-fee Professional Services and Engineering Services, free Community Support and a for-fee Enterprise-Quality Sustaining Support. When people ask for "GlassFish Support" they usually mean the latter as a way to support the use of GlassFish in a production environment, so that's where I'll start.

The first thing to understand is the basic release cycle of GlassFish: there are Daily, Weekly, Milestones (frequency varies) and Final Releases. Each Milestone is a mini-release cycle, with its own stabilization phase at the end.

Although Milestone releases are quite stable, they are not intended for production deployment and Sun provides formal Sustaining Support only for final releases. Of course, since this is Open Source so you make your own risk assessment and go on production with, say, a Release Candidate milestone, but we may discover a bad bug that may cause significant changes before the actual final release.

The next thing to understand is the relationship between the App Server builds you can get from the GlassFish web site at Java.Net and those you can get directly from Sun's download pages at Sun.Com (like the Java EE SDK Downloads). As I explained previously in my No Bait and Switch note, there are no differences in the JARs in the two distributions, the only differences are the installer, the presence of a few extra JDBC drivers and that Java.Net has all the builds: daily, weekly, and all milestones and finals, while the Sun.Com distros only have the most stable milestones (called EA, TP, or Betas) and the Final releases.

Now I can describe the sustaining story for GlassFish. We use carefully controlled repositories forked from those of the Final GF Releases into which we contribute fixes for important bugs. We create regular sustaining patches from that repository that are available to commercial subscribers (via SunSolve), as well as the usual 24x7, worldwide support, knowledge database, etc (see my note on Commercial Support) and Alexis's Support for GlassFish - What's in it for me

To ensure that the bugs don't reappear, we also propagate the bug fixes in the sustaining repositories into the public repositories, although the timing and details of this will vary depending on the cycle, and, of course, the public repositories also receive many other changes at the same time, some of which will be new bugs :-(. This process is described in my note on Productizing Open Source - The GlassFish Approach.

Finally, Alexis' Note also explained how sustaining tests the bug fixes, including longevity testing, to ensure the bug fixes are very solid.

With all of this in context, many of the posts in this blog will correspond to individual sustaining (aka patch) releases and will describe the bugs fixed in there. We will start with the patches for the GFv1 branch and then will cover the current, v2, branch.

I hope we have explained the role of the sustaining releases in the support offering. If you are interested in purchasing support, talk to your Sun representative, or Buy Support Online.

This is the first post in a new group news blog: GlassFish For Business.

GlassFish For Busness will provide information on Sun's offerings related to the GlassFish community, including the GlassFish Application Server and OpenMQ Server. We will cover the basics of the subscription offerings from Sun, the differences between the free community releases and the for-fee commercial releases, training (free, for-fee, web-based, instructor-led), consulting-services (professional, engineering), other distributions, Update Center, Sun Partners for GlassFish, etc.

Our goal is to cover all the aspects needed for the successful deployment of GlassFish in production / commercial situations and, over time, we may expand the topics covered here based on your feedback.

This blog complements and builds on other existing blogs, including:

• The Aquarium - focused on the Community activity
• Stories - informal articles on GF in production
• GlassFish Podcasts - interviews and more

There are a number of bloggers that write about GlassFish, some notable mentions include Miles to Go and Bistro!; we try to cover them all at TheAquarium (you can also try the experimental GlassFish Planet). TheAquarium itself is localized to several languages, including English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and Korean.

Like TheAquarium, GlassFish For Business is a Group Blog and several authors will collaborate to cover the different topics and to keep the information current.

This blog will include a series of posts for all the free (public) and for-fee distributions. Moving forward we will try to publish these entries as soon as the releases are available but since a number of these distributions were made available before we started this blog, we will retroactively document them as a reference point for our readers.