| Sun ONE Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition System Deployment Guide |
Chapter 1
Overview of DeploymentThis chapter describes what you need to know to set up your SunTM Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition the way that best meets your requirements.
This chapter contains the following sections:
About DeploymentSuccessful deployment of complex applications on the Sun ONE Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition requires that you consider practical aspects of the environment. In general, you should begin by assessing your goals for performance and availability. You should then plan the hardware, network, and resource configuration accordingly.
Here are the important goals that you should consider while planning the deployment:
You gather information related to these goals and then analyze it to establish a processing threshold for your site.
In considering performance, consider both—application server instances and the Sun ONE High Availability Database (HADB).
The HADB uses the patented Always-On technology and works as the persistence store to provide high availability for web applications. It offers an ideal platform for delivering all types of session state persistence within an enterprise application server environment. For more information on configuring HADB, see the Sun One Application Server Administrator’s Guide.
Throughput
Throughput is the number of requests that Sun ONE Application Server can service in a given time period, for example per minute. You should estimate the maximum number of operations and transactions that the system needs to perform under peak load conditions. It is also useful to determine the operations and transactions per minute under steady state (typical) load conditions. This will help you to determine the network bandwidth needed, the number of application server instances required, and the number of HADB nodes required.
You should also consider plans to increase capacity in future.
Response Time
You should determine the acceptable response time from the system under heavy load. This has a direct bearing on hardware capacity planning.
Availability
Will your system be running 24 x 7? If there is a failure in the system, will your users notice it? Do you have a subset of applications that need to be available all the time whereas other applications will run only periodically? The answers to these questions determine your availability needs. You will have to build redundancy into the system to meet availability needs and to avoid single points of failure.
Phases of the Deployment ProcessThe deployment process primarily comprises the following three phases, each one building on the previous one:
Planning Your Environment
Planning your environment is the first phase of deployment and consists of determining how the Sun ONE Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition fits into your overall enterprise. Central to planning your environment is the assessment of the goals discussed in "About Deployment". You establish performance goals related to throughput and response time. You also determine your availability goals.
Based on the performance and availability goals, you consider the network requirements and the infrastructure requirements including hardware, storage, and network requirements.
You may realize during this process that you should change the structure and components of your network to accommodate your Sun ONE Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition needs. Or, if your network structure is not flexible at this time, use the environment planning process to determine how you can best deploy Sun ONE Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition to fit within the existing network setup.
This phase is discussed in detail in Chapter 2, "Planning your Environment."
Selecting a Topology
Once you have determined the performance, availability, network, and infrastructure requirements, you then select a topology that best meets your performance needs. A topology is the schematic arrangement of the Sun ONE Application Server components and the communication flow between these components. This document describes two topologies (and their variations) that you can choose from.
This phase is discussed in detail in Chapter 3, "Selecting a Topology."
Running Tests
Once you configure the Sun ONE Application Server 7, Enterprise Edition, you deploy a representative sampling of applications and run tests on these applications to check whether the performance meets your performance goals. Wherever you identify bottlenecks, use this phase to fine-tune the system and improve performance.
This phase is highly dependent on your particular environment and is, therefore, not covered in this guide.
