Shreedhar' s Weblog

GlassFish Clustering: Meaning and impact of configuring attributes of group-management-service element ?

Based on a query from one of our field colleagues, I added an FAQ entry on the meaning of the group-management-service element attributes  and impact of changing the default values as this is not yet covered by our official documentation (it will be updated with this information soon).

These configurational attributes determine Shoal GMS's behavior with respect to Discovery and Health Monitoring of cluster instances in a GlassFish cluster. It is very useful and important to understand these underpinnings of GlassFish's runtime clustering engine.

Here's the FAQ entry :

Posted at 05:02PM Jun 21, 2009 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in GlassFish  |  Comments[0]

Performance Monitor enters Sun's GlassFish offerings

Sun today announced an array of commercial offerings based around the successful open source GlassFish project's application server. As part of these offerings is an enterprise management enabler tool aptly called Enterprise Manager

The Enterprise Manager is a collection of utilities designed to enhance your production deployment experience with Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1

The Enterprise Manager comprises of three components :

• Performance Advisor
• SNMP Monitoring support
• Performance Monitor

The Enterprise Manager is included when you purchase a support subscription for Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1. For more details on the Enterprise Manager look here.  For more details on the Sun GlassFish Portfolio subscription plans, look here.

Of the above Enterprise Manager components, the Performance Advisor, and SNMP Monitoring support components are covered in a few other blogs. In this entry, I'll introduce you to the Performance Monitor.

The Performance Monitor is a closed source product from Sun built on top of VisualVM 1.1, and Netbeans 6.5 Platform. It is a  monitoring tool that provides dynamic visualization of GlassFish Server as it runs your applications.

Some of its key features include :

• Monitoring local and remote Java processes
• Trendline representation through charts for JVM monitoring artifacts such as Heap, CPU utilization, threads, classes, etc much like JConsole.
• Data collection, processing and charting for GlassFish monitoring artifacts. There are extensive charts that leverage the GlassFish JMX based APIs and provide views into monitoring the health of your GlassFish deployment. 

The Performance Monitor is designed with easy-to-use features including:

• Easy connectivity
• Local or remote GlassFish servers    
• Choice of SSL/TLS based secure, or plain JMX connections
• Logical fine-grained views of GlassFish servers, clusters, node agents, deployed artifacts and services
• Embellishments such as
  
• tool tips explaining what the chart is about and current numbers,
  
• ability to hide certain chart lines from a chart,
• hide/unhide charts from the page view
• drag top level tab to the side or bottom of page for a lateral or stacked view of the charts.
  
• Detailed charts covering telemetry data for common, critical services and resources in production systems based on feedback from existing customers on the need for charting these monitoring artifacts
  
• these include Http Services including per listener views, Web services, Pools such as thread pools, JDBC and other connection pool statistics, etc.

Here are some screenshots for your reference :

A collective view of a few web tier monitoring data:   

A view of the Http Service graphs :

A View of the Node Agent Page with status of instances the Node Agent is managing:

The Performance Monitor tool is immensely helpful in diagnosing problems before they turn into production bottlenecks and show stoppers. We hope that this offering along with GlassFish support subscription will help our customers be successful with their GlassFish deployments.

Posted at 03:21PM Feb 10, 2009 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in GlassFish  |  Comments[0]

New Shoal Update : Shoal 1.1 bits updated to promoted build 10212008

Shoal 1.1 bits on the Shoal download site have been updated to reflect the promoted build dated 10/21/2008.  We are getting close to releasing Shoal 1.1 sometime in late November.

Get the latest promoted build here.

We have also added a buildable Source and Javadocs zip distribution corresponding to this promoted build on the download page based on a community user request.

A number of fixes went into Shoal during this time (from the prior promoted build of 08202008). Read the announcement here for changes that went in.

Project Shoal benefited not only from the Shoal user community feedback but also the intensive testing that is ongoing for the upcoming Sailfin v1 release in December. As a Telco appserver, Sailfin provides the ideal testing ground for intensive clustering features. Truly where the rubber hits the road.

Thanks very much to Sheetal, Joseph Fialli, Mohamed Abdelaziz, Bongjae Chang, Sailfin and GlassFish Quality Engineers Kazem, Sony and Varun, and most of all the Shoal community members.

As always, we value your feedback so please do continue sending us feedback to help improve Shoal and to address your needs with Shoal clustering. 

Posted at 05:10PM Oct 24, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in Shoal  |  Comments[0]

Economic woes resulting in slashed tech budgets? Sun's GlassFish+MySQL makes perfect sense

With signs of a global economic turmoil underway, the financial system is under severe stress with credits vanishing, and Government Departments, small and medium businesses, and large corporations are faced with potential budget cuts for technology spending. Case in point : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27103082/

With Sun's open source "stack" and cost-effective support subscriptions, affected sectors of the economy can take advantage of standards based, high quality, open source software with the low cost support services from Sun. This is a good time to consider moving away from expensive proprietary software stacks to Sun's open source software.

Take the case of Sun's commercially supported GlassFish + MySQL offering, both rock solid products that come with features only available in high cost closed-source products. This offering provides you the opportunity to seamlessly move from expensive licenses to an annual support subscription based offering that will reduce your cost of ownership. For example, Unlimited deployment of GlassFish + MySQL starts at $65,000. GlassFish + MySQL constitutes a very compelling offering that will help you justify the move both on features and costs.

Contact Sun to find out how you can save significantly with this offering.

For more on the value proposition, read Arun's blog entry here.

Posted at 02:49PM Oct 21, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in GlassFish  |  Comments[0]

Shoal 1.1 bits updated for a new promoted build

The Shoal team has been busy addressing the needs of major projects such as Sailfin for a while now. It had been a while since we updated our promoted build for download with the latest and greatest fixes.

We have now promoted a new build for Shoal 1.1 and download bits are available here : https://shoal.dev.java.net/downloadsindex.html

The announcement has more details on what went into this promoted build : 08202008 Promoted Build Announcement

We would welcome your feedback, issue reports and enhancement requests to make Shoal more useful for you.

Do send us your feedback at the Shoal user mailing list.

Posted at 03:02PM Aug 26, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in Shoal  |  Comments[0]

Eclipse IDE GlassFish Plugin : Give us your feedback

Did you know that GlassFish community provides an Eclipse plugin for developers using Eclipse as their primary development tool ?

The plugin has been developed for a while providing basic integration with GlassFish. We now would like to make this integration more effective and useful to you to enhance your productivity when using GlassFish.

We would like to hear from developers on your experience (both positive and constructive) so that we can prioritize on making improvements. Our goal is to make life a lot easier for developers when using Eclipse with GlassFish. Community feedback is the best way we can learn how to make improvements. Of course, we also very much welcome any contributions from you to make improvements.

The plugin is available at the GlassFish Plugins Java.net Project Page.
Please send us your feedback and/or contributions at either the GlassFish users mailing list or at the GlassFish Plugins users mailing list.

Posted at 12:03PM Jun 03, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in NetBeans, Other IDEs  |  Comments[2]

JavaOne2008: Shoal Mini Talk at Java.Net Community Corner

At the JavaOne pavilion, Java.net had set up a community corner where mini talks were given by various interested project leads. I gave a short talk on Introducing Shoal clustering framework. 

The audience was *very* small  but I had quality questions from one very interested participant who wanted to use Shoal as a Distributed Test Harness engine. Very unique use case I thought and yes, Shoal would fit that bill.

Here's the short slide deck of the mini talk: Shoal Mini Talk JavaOne 2008

Posted at 04:50PM May 09, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in Shoal  |  Comments[0]

JavaOne 08: JavaU Bonus course on GlassFish Application Server

As part of JavaU courses offered this JavaOne, a GlassFish Application Server bonus training course was offered for free as part of a multi course deal. 

Many attended this course on Monday, May 05, 08. Arun Gupta and I  presented at this course. We are pleasantly surprised by the turn out of around 180 given that it was in the evening (6 - 9 pm), 3 hours long, and JavaOne had not yet started! That was surely a boost of positive energy for me.

The most interesting part of the course for me was the number of questions from the greatly interactive audience right from the get go. We answered most of the questions, even picked up an NB issue from an audience member in the web services area, and the feedback we received was mostly that the course was very helpful for the audience to understand how the product features and capabilities stacked up with their experience with other app servers such as WebLogic and JBoss.

We finished around 9.45 pm.

Since the printed slide deck was only a portion of the total at the time it went to print, I promised the audience that I would make this available through my blog.

So here it is. JavaU Bonus Course on GlassFish Application Server Java One 2008

So for those who find the material useful, please download GlassFish and let us know what you think. Send us your comments and questions through the GlassFish User mailing list.  

Posted at 04:38PM May 09, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in General  |  Comments[1]

New Shoal Clustering Download Page

With a view to helping our users choose the right download, we have organized the Shoal downloads page on the lines of the GlassFish download page. The new download page is located here : https://shoal.dev.java.net/downloadsindex.html

This should make it easier for users to find Shoal bits and use them in their clustering applications.We are seeing increasing interest from users with different types of questions in the Shoal user mailing list ranging from newbie questions to very advanced ones. Keep'em coming folks.

We will be posting new promoted downloads  and releases through this download page. Let us know if you need specific improvements to be made.

Posted at 12:23PM Apr 18, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in Shoal  |  Comments[0]

GlassFish High Availability Session at Sun Tech Days Hyderabad

At the recent Sun Tech Days event at Hyderabad, I gave a talk covering GlassFish's High Availability features, particularly the In-Memory Replication support, as part of GlassFish Day (Feb 29th). 

I had the privilege of talking to a full house of around 500 people. The session covered introduction to HA, how easy it is to create, and configure a cluster of instances, and to configure the application for enabling in-memory replication based availability. The session elicited very good questions ranging from the basics to involved ones in the area of sizing the heap to sticky sessions support. I spent an hour after the session outside the hall answering questions posed by interested folks from several companies.

Many attendees wanted to get a copy of the slide deck. Look here for it.

Needless to say, we would very much appreciate any feedback or questions on GlassFish's High Availability. Please send these to us at the GlassFish user mailing alias.

Posted at 05:00PM Mar 12, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in GlassFish  |  Comments[2]

Notes from GlassFish Booth at Sun Tech Days, Hyderabad '08

I am back after a two week visit to India. I took the week off last week to be with my folks and to unwind and recharge in my home city, Mumbai.

The week before that was an incredible one for me as I saw the hi tech boom in India first hand. The swelling and enthusiastic crowds at the Sun Tech Days event at Hyderabad on Feb 27, 28 and 29 was very thrilling to experience to say the least. The event was highly successful in attracting budding youngsters and experienced professionals alike. I am told that the content of the event was very fulfilling for attendees.

Some notes of interest :

• Each session had between 1000 and 1500 attendees. Community Day was on Feb 29th with tracks such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, Netbeans, etc. and each track had an expected 450 people based on hall capacity. In the GlassFish track, we saw that increase to around 500.
  

• At the GlassFish booth, I met quite a lot of visitors many of whom had either vaguely heard about GlassFish or never heard of it. About a 3rd of people were ones who work with an Application Server in a professional capacity. Others were developers learning the ropes at work or students who were excited to see an open source appserver like GlassFish.

• GlassFish is relatively new here - people have heard about it and are now beginning to try it out. So this was a huge opportunity to spread the word about GlassFish as a compelling open source project delivering a fully Java EE 5 compliant application server packing a whole bunch of features that commercial vendors usually provide for the cost of an expensive license and services attachment.
  

• Many professionals I talked to had tried JBoss before but due to their employer or customer platform preference, they were on WebSphere or WebLogic.
  They were impressed with GlassFish's Administration ease of use and GlassFish's published SpecJ numbers.
  

• Companies from which people came to booth read like the who's who of the hitech majors' list such as Wipro, Satyam, Infosys, Cap Gemini, etc.

• Most users were still developing on J2EE 1.4. Many are beginning to move to Java EE 5.

• Many developers I met were on Eclipse. I demoed GlassFish and NetBeans 6.0 when possible at the booth and many went back saying they will surely try NB with GF.
  

• GlassFish's open source status
• Free for development and deployment
• No license fee for product purchase
• Strong community support
• Sun's backing and commercial support offering (the concept of indemnification was new for some but many understood impact for their customers abroad)
• Administration ease of use
• Market leading product differentiators such as Grizzly, Virtual server support in Web tier, Web Services support, Easy cluster creation and management, Call Flow Monitoring, High Availability Options through In-memory replication and HADB, Inclusion of a quality MQ product, Netbeans and Eclipse IDE integration, etc.
  
  

Many of the professionals working with other application servers said the Administration, Clustering, High Availability, Loadbalancer support, Webservices support, migration support, and IDE integration would motivate them to try out or switch to GlassFish. 

Looking forward to hearing from these new GlassFish users at our user community mailing list.

Posted at 06:32PM Mar 11, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in GlassFish  |  Comments[0]

Sailfin drives a new feature in Shoal: JoinedAndReadyNotificationSignal

As usage of Shoal's clustering framework increases across products, new feature requests are coming in to enrich Shoal's offerings for employing applications.

The Sailfin project is building a Telecommunications Application Server with contributions from Ericsson and Sun. One of the parts of Sailfin is a Java based load balancer called ConvergedLoadBalancer (CLB). The CLB load balances both Http and SIP based requests. The CLB is unique in that it is a component of the Sailfin appserver instance. Thus, any instance in the cluster can be configured as a load balancer. Such an instance can be part of a Front End LB Cluster performing load balancing of requests on a separate application server cluster tier or it can be part of a Self LoadBalancing Cluster wherein one or more instances of the application server cluster also perform the role of a load balancer while also serving requests. The CLB component and other Sailfin components employ Shoal for cluster events, messaging and health monitoring.

The CLB (as with any load balancer) needs to know when instances of a cluster have not only joined a cluster but also when the instances are ready serve requests. Shoal was up until now providing a JoinNotificationSignal which would be triggered as soon as each instance in the cluster used Shoal's GMS to join the cluster. This was sufficient for many use cases but for the LB it needed to know not just that but also when the instance had completed startup operations. This requirement helped us design a new notification called JoinedAndReadyNotificationSignal that would be disseminated to the cluster members for each instance completing startup and reporting such a completion to the group.

Shoal's GroupManagementService provides a new API called reportJoinAndReadyState() which the employing parent application can now call when the parent application has completed its own initialization and startup indicating a point where operational activities on the instance can now start.

Sheetal and I recently committed the code supporting this new feature.

This feature can be particularly useful while building Compute Grid and Cloud Computing type services using Shoal wherein each Grid node can now report when they are ready to act as nodes in the grid. BTW Shoal's concept of  a GroupLeader ties in well with the Grid's Compute Task Manager abstraction and is a good infrastructural fit.

Do please share your feedback with us at users alias about what you would like to see added in Shoal to serve your clustering and fault tolerance needs. Shoal's goal of clustering goes much beyond the realm of Data Grids (which we are looking into building ) with a wider  spread in terms of building fault tolerance solutions.

Posted at 08:30AM Jan 17, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in Shoal  |  Comments[9]

GlassFish Hidden Nugget: Automatic Distributed Transaction Recovery Service

GlassFish v2 and v2 ur1 releases (and later) have support for transaction recovery (both manual and automated) in the sense that incomplete transactions at the time of an instance failure can be committed either manually or automatically.

Posted at 02:16PM Jan 11, 2008 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in GlassFish  |  Comments[0]

Excellent Article on Shoal by non-Sun authors

Just came across this excellent introductory article on Shoal clustering framework on Java.net which I believe is to be published on upcoming Tuesday going by the date posted (12/11/2007).

Noticeably, this is an article by authors that we, at the Shoal community, have not yet corresponded with. This is great news as it lets us know that there is a quiet adoption of this framework. The article lucidly explains salient aspects of Shoal's clustering approach and how easy it is to integrate it into your application/infrastructure. 

We hope this will make it even easier for users to adopt this technology.

Do send us your questions at the Shoal users mailing list.

Posted at 01:53PM Dec 08, 2007 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in Shoal  |  Comments[1]

Shoal Whitepaper on Scalable Dynamic Clustering

Its been a while since I have blogged. I have been rather busy managing the GlassFish v2 ur1 release which is round the corner around Dec 13/14.

Meanwhile, Mohamed Abdelaziz and I put together a Whitepaper that gives details on the scalability and dynamic clustering aspects of Shoal. The paper provides a good overview of the self composing nature of Shoal and dives deeper into the set of protocols that provide the basis for building fault tolerant infrastructures.

Shoal is coming along very well in various spaces going by the increasing hits to our website from Telco and Financial majors. We are continuously improving Shoal into a robust component based on feedback from our user community. So keep'em coming to the users mailing list.

Posted at 06:59PM Dec 05, 2007 by Shreedhar Ganapathy in Shoal  |  Comments[0]