Case Study: WAS ND 7 Migration

Project Description

Reputable national life insurance company (client) prepares its back end development for the installation of TemenosTM application on the WebSphere Application Servicer (WAS) installation. Client sought a provider to migrate WAS 7 ND from jBoss on a Windows 2008 platform. With more than 1,000,000 insurance policies, customers rely on the company for life insurance, annuity and travel accident insurance.

The main issue within the migration was making jBoss classes visible in the EARs. Due to the difference in default binding patterns, the JDNI naming had to be modified. In addition, specific open source libraries had to be included through packaging within the application archive file or using shared libraries. Adding to the challenge was a persistence.xml file within the app_EJB/META-­? INF folder that had to be modified to work with WebSphere.

The successful migration began with a thorough analysis of jBoss deployment artifacts via IBM RAD. It was imperative that the TxMQ consultants understood the hardware runtime environment and that the tuning was completed accordingly. One of the most important components was infrastructure management. This management included logging, monitoring and deployment. TxMQ consultants also created several comparable sandbox environments in which to configure, deploy and properly test and tune the migration. Security also needed to be decided upon. After careful consideration SiteMinder and WebSphere LTPA were chosen.

The outset of the project saw migration for 16 JVMs across environments. TxMQ consultants completed performance testing to set JVM heaps/tuning parameters by using SOAPui toolsets for web services. The client chose Alfresco as the content management system and TxMQ’s consultant wrote deployment scripts to manage content into web-­?servers using Alfresco API calls. IBM ISA v4.0 was used for WebSphere monitoring, Javacore analysis and GC analysis and WebSphere’s JVM’s were configured for monitoring via SNMP.
Photo courtesy of Flickr contributor Claus Rebler