we are currently running webMethods 6.1 on Windows 2000 (WINTEL). As this OS Version is now behind of it’s life and we are also face with limitations of an 32bit JVM we are planning to migrate.
Option 1: Wait for webMethods to support 64bit JVM on Windows 2003 or others (Vista?)
Option 2: Migrate to HPUX 11i based on Itanium CPU’s.
Knowing that also today our Hardware is not the latest (HP DL 380 G3 and HP GL580 G2) I would like to get you feedback.
Questions:
A) How much system power would we gain using latest WINTEL servers? What would you recommend?
B) How much power would the migration from 32 to 64 bit gain for us (if any).
C) How much power more or less would we have to expect with HPUX?
D) Is there an easy way to kow upftront how many more licenes of webMethods are needed to double a systems perfromance? (I would hope this is not double there count).
E) Has someone of you already done such an migration?
I would evaluate several things before making this decision and it sounds like you are already on that track with your options.
-Migrating from Windows to Unix is a big step depending on your organization and its support capabilities. I am a big fan of Unix but if you are primarily a Windows shop, I would weigh that. Are you using any of the Windows specific features that the Integration Server offers?
-webMethods product line is fully supported on Windows meaning everything they make runs on Windows and it is usually their development platform. Solaris is their second platform that almost all of their product line runs on, they don’t port the developer any more in 6.5 to Solaris. We run Solaris at my shop, very robust and very stable. The other platforms don’t have all of the options, I would check their platform guide to see what components run on what platforms. For example, the Mainframe adapter doesn’t run on Linux.
-64bit JVM is good is you have memory intense applications like maybe greater than 2GB. There are some more performance gains with threads in some applications. I would check and see if webMethods has done any performance testing with the 64bit JVM’s. The latest performance papers I saw from webMethods using the 6.5 product line had Windows 32 bit doing very well performance wise.
-If you are looking to the future and the Operating System war winners, most analyst are predicting Windows, Linux and Solaris. If it were me, I would look at my shop and see where those fit. HPUX is a very good OS but HP doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.
-If you are having performance issues I would look at the root cause of the issues to determine if it is a logic or flow service issue, memory issue, cpu issue, disk issue or OS. More than likely its going to be logic/flow service(Integration Server), memory, cpu or disk. The OS causing the performance is less likely although possible. Adding memory or faster disk is pretty easy, CPU’s cost a lot because of the webMethods licensing structure.
No, and we are already sure that our code will run on Linux and HPUX without code changes. Our current design already extracts all depending parts as values into a configuration file.
Apart from IS and Broker we are using “only” SAP adapter, JDBC, XSLT and some old parts like WMDB. Therefore I don’t expect any problem. All incomming / outgoing traffice is via HTTP(s) and a very tiny bit FTP/SMTP.
Yes, but as far as I know webMethods does currently not support Windows 2003 64bit and JVM 64bit on Windows or did I oversee something?
That’s one point of my list, but as I am looking for performance and later scalability HPUX is an interesting candidate. Especially looking to an large installation and HP’s Itanium servers.
We already know the root cause, but we can’t solve it. Because the root cause is very high system volume (transaction traffic). We could simply add more windows boxes in parallel (behing our LB), but this is clearly not an goot long term strategy and might also be more expensive than just buying some new state of the art UX servers now.
Therefore I am also interesed in finding someone who already migrated from WINTEL to UX (must not be HPUX) and/or other people who already use some state of the art hardware (e.g. HP Itanium).
Sounds good. I think, if you haven’t already, I would check out the performance numbers on Windows before jumping to HP. If you know your bottleneck is transaction volume, webMethods has published their results with Windows and 6.5. They are very impressive. I not so sure you are going to get better performance on HP. As I said it’s more a second tier platform for webMethods and their product line. I’m also a pretty big Solaris fan but the webMethods product line seems to run the faster on the Intel platform and Windows. At least according to their numbers.
ITANIUM not really the chip of the future either but that’s your call. I’m sure some HP customers will jump in here and comment if there are any. just kidding, there are a couple.
