mike4soa building/testing/scaling Open ESB

Back with a not-so-weekly news update…

* Try out Windows 7 Beta in VirtualBox

… on Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris

* Ten examples of SOA at work, circa 2008

… interesting requirements/uses

* Back to SOA business

… SOA projects add value even while budgets shrink

* Year in Review: Java development in 2009

… New directions for the Java platform

* Sun’s JDK7, OpenJDK & IcedTea: Disambiguation

… what’s coming (maybe)

Category: general, java, netbeans, open source, virtualbox

As we approach the end of the year, here are some more SOA, Virtualization, Cloud Computing  links for the week:

* Five fearless predictions for SOA 2009

* Give It Time: An SOA Lesson from My Great-Grandmother

* SOA Success Depends on Service Integration -Using JBI and Open ESB

* Sun revs VirtualBox desktop virtualization - Put your chip in a (virtual) box

* Ten Key Reasons Enterprise Cloud Computing Is Going Places

Category: cloud computing, jbi, open-esb, virtualbox

Category: glassfish, jbi, open-esb, project fuji, virtualbox

In an attempt to highlight some SOA related news each week, this is the second SOA Friday blog post.

• More kudos for the GlassFish application server
• and for JBI and Glassfish ESB
• The next step in Project OpenESB’s evolution: commercial support
• A new Introduction to GlassFish ESB screencast
• Open ESB Community discussion mentions:  Open-ESB related Sun supported products comparison
• World-Leading Enterprise Application Server Providers Propel OSGi Technology to an Industry-Wide Standard
• Sun unveils open source server virtualisation

(SOA-related how? GlassFish ESB bundles GlassFish v2 and NetBeans SOA tools; future Open ESB work (and GlassFish v3) embrace OSGi, and virtualization is handy for developing/testing ESBs)

Category: glassfish, glassfish esb, virtualbox

Some Open ESB related news of interest (at least to me) this week:

• milestone 1 download is now available on the Open ESB downloads page (unlike the open-source Open ESB project, commercial support will soon be available from Sun for GlassFish ESB)
• Here are some details about the Open ESB Proxy Binding and Distributed JBI
• Open ESB and Open JBI Components issue trackers are now merged
• Sun Launched xVM this week
  

Category: glassfish esb, open-esb, virtualbox

While migrating from MKSTools to Cygwin to VMWare-plus-Knoppix over the years, I’ve recently ended up with VirtualBox-plus-Ubuntu as my preferred way to run *nix-depenedent builds/tests on my Windows systems at home.

Reducing cost is one a factor.  A bigger factor is the ease of finding documentation, FAQs and HOW-TOs.  VirtualBox and Ubuntu just seem easier to use, too.  Another factor is power use.

With Solar PV cells soon to be offsetting a small percentage of the electricity I use at home for servers, consolidating multiple virtual servers on fewer physical systems with larger memory reduces power use by a large percentage.

The kill-a-watt shows that my home server systems consume around 2 Amps each, so instead of running four at once it would be better to consolidate the work on to one system, saving 75% or 6 Amps.  (I use Solaris Zones on my lab systems at work to also conserve power, space, and cooling requirements).

Category: virtualbox

virtualization plan

Working towards JBI Service Engine scalable testing

When checking out different branches from different projects using different tools, it is hard to predict which two or three builds need to run at any given time.   I’ve had to maintain nearly identical setups across multiple physical systems.

Plan: attach granular VirtualBox disks to a particular virtual machine as needed.

The benefits:

• save energy (powering up fewer physical machines when only running a couple of builds at once)

• “on demand” scaling (”move” work to additional physical machines by copying a relatively small disk image for each vm)

• less entropy (cloning disks ensures identical setups)

This makes it easier to distribute test clients and servers across my network and try different WS-Notification publish/subscribe use-cases and configurations.

Category: open-esb, virtualbox

Setup: a Windows laptop with a VirtualBox (Ubuntu) guest machine,  running Open ESB, for developing WS-Notification demos.

A use-case: Moving the laptop from one location to another, requiring: pausing, hibernating, waking, switching from wireless to LAN connection, and resuming the virtual machine (which works, yay!).

A problem: However, when resuming the guest machine, it had the wrong date and time.  Then trying the ntpdate command failed to fix this, due to the laptop’s different network setup.

A solution: create a script, for example in:

/usr/local/bin/myresume.sh

to compensate for this, with two commands:

#/bin/sh
dhclient
ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com

(After running this, as root, the resumed guest machine was all set to go.)

Category: virtualbox