From: Steve L. <ste...@hp...> - 2008-01-09 14:49:21
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DGe...@wi... wrote: > Hi, > > I am new to the list and SmartFrog. I would like to find out if anyone has > used SmartFrog to automate deployments and configuration management of > JBoss servers. Our company in increasingly using them for hosting of > large volume Web applications. We reached the point when the automation of > their administration is needed. > > I've already read the documentation and was pleased with the capabilities > of SmartFrog. Our concerns are related in great part to reliability, > scalability and performance penalties (CPU mainly) caused by introduction > of SmartFrog on a production host. It would be nice to hear expereinces > from other users. One things are running, there's minimal CPU overhead. The only load on running systems is liveness, where a thread walks down the tree checking that everything is alive, according to their sfPing() methods. Components that do heavier work here (such as issue SQL commands or GET urls) can put load on the system. To manage this you can control the frequency of liveness checks. Memory footprint is a function of how many components are deployed...you can get away with the SmartFrog JVM being relatively small, and starting JBoss in its own process. > Since SmartFrog is a framework we would need to invest significant effort > in building and testing the components required to support our > requirements. There is already a declaration to start up JBoss, extending the server-neutral deploy-by-copy www server, that handles deployment of things underneath just by copying the JAR files to a target directory. Here's the URL to the descriptor http://smartfrog.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/smartfrog/trunk/core/components/www/src/org/smartfrog/services/www/servers/jboss4.sf?view=markup To actually start JBoss, we just set up the Java component with the right arguments, and add the JDK's tools.jar to the classpath, which is needed to compile JSP pages. I've also played with using Cargo under SmartFrog to manage the start/stop; Cargo is the tool from codehaus that can start/stop lots of different application servers: http://cargo.codehaus.org/ As I recall, Cargo 0.8 was breaking with an NPE, and when I moved up to cargo 0.9. all our tests broke ( http://jira.smartfrog.org/jira/browse/SFOS-138 ). I haven't been doing any work on cargo since may/june. Beyond that, there is JMX configuration. We do have a jmx component bundle, sf-jmx, that uses MX4J; we've been pondering moving to Java 5 JMX instead, which would make for a lighter distribution. The JMX integration is two way: SF components become JMX configurable; JMX MBeans can be set under SmartFrog. We've not looked at starting JBoss this way -yet. I'd recommend you start with the jboss4.sf template, which ships within the sf-www component, then put enough pressure on me to bring the Cargo component up to cargo 0.9 and get the tests working again. Once we have those tests stable we can turn them on in the continuous integration servers, which stops any regressions creeping in to the SmartFrog side of the codebase. Any tests you can contribute here would be beneficial -currently we create a test WAR that we deploy in jetty, tomcat and jboss -I don't test EAR files, or the JBoss-specific SAR files. It would be good to create some of these and something that deploys anything else that is JBoss-specific. As you're interested in JBoss support, I can put more some time into it, especially if you are willing to help with testing what I'm doing. What platform are you likely to run underneath -windows/unix? and which JVM? >I am curious if anyone has tried to build a GUI that would > simplify the automation tasks. We have an Eclipse plugin, and a NetBeans component was contributed -I've been working on the latter recently but I havent cut a release of it yet. These are both essentially text editor modes with some ways of running SmartFrog. -Steve ----------------------- Hewlett-Packard Limited Registered Office: Cain Road, Bracknell, Berks RG12 1HN Registered No: 690597 England |