Recently, a paying customer, in order to save money, wanted to use our
Appserver, install it on 10 (or more) different solaris zones, and run
their portal on each of those installations.
Consider this: there's one system administrator, trying to setup 10
copies of the same appserver. all the resources available to each
installation are the same. similar applications will be running on those
copies of appserver. If the system administrator were to alter 10 (say)
parameters on each of those installations, it would soon become
unwieldy, and unmanageable. Instead, the admin, tunes the 10 parameters
on one installation, and then for the others, points to this one
'golden' configuration that can be picked up.
Another use case: A tech lead in a mid size company that uses our
application server to develop applications on, is an expert in
performance tuning. She tunes her own machine to the proper parameters,
and emails a pointer to her machine, where the rest of her team can pick
up the configuration from. so since they all have machines of same
capabilities, they can now all work with the same performance parameters
to see the response times of their projects.
Yet another use case: a professor teaching a course on distributed
reliable systems tunes his own machine. then asks his students to pick
up the environment from his machine for simulating performance of a
website that they're about to crash.
I'm sure there could be tons more. And I know that we already provide a
way to our customers to do this by copying relevant files (config
directory/ backing up domains...).
My thought is, shouldn't we formally support this feature through the
admin infrastructure? re-quoting the example: At the time GlassFish is
installed, or a new domain is created, the user is asked whether the
parameters should be picked from another machine on the intranet?
I haven't evaluated competitor products, and thus, do not have
information if this feature is supported on other products. But I think
that this feature is a natural extension to what we offer, and so should
consider supporting it formally.
Thoughts?
-Aditya
> Subject:
> Re: Making it easy for the system admins?
> From:
> Kedar Mhaswade <Kedar.Mhaswade_at_Sun.COM>
> Date:
> Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:50:26 -0700
> To:
> admin_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
>
> To:
> admin_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
>
>
> Can you be more specific?
> Usually the tuning parameters are specific to a particular
> machine and resources available, so I am not able to understand
> the requirement here.
>
> Did you see such a facility in a competitor/other product?
> Can you send a link to their documentation?
>
> Kedar
>
> Aditya Dada wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I believe there could be a very common scenario of use of Glassfish,
>> in which an admin would setup GlassFish on one zone of Solaris (say),
>> or one machine, and then would like that installation to pick up the
>> tuning parameters (e.g. pool size, permgen size etc.) from another
>> location. Currently there's no easy way to do this (other than copy
>> some directory/files from one machine to another).
>>
>> Is there any plan on making this easier for the system administrators
>> in upcoming releases?
>>
>> For e.g. at the time GlassFish is installed, or a new domain is
>> created, the user is asked whether the parameters should be picked
>> from another machine on the intranet? Or, a feature that lets system
>> administrators search for parameters that are set differently on
>> other machines in the same company/department, and then as a table of
>> values is presented, compare, adopt or discard those.
>>
>> I believe there is something on similar lines already being
>> discussed, but I just wanted to find out if this situation had been
>> covered.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -Aditya