VIRTUALIZE NOW! January 17, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : software, virtualization , add a commentI am becoming ever more convinced that the truly agile enterprise will wholeheartedly embrace virtualization within its IT function. Perhaps this elicits a head-slapping “duh!” from some of you?
Some recent challenges at the day job caused me to consider how virtualization might have saved the day.
Whilst investigating various causes for the problem at hand, one possibility was upgrading the service pack of the application server. However, given the downtime that this would present and the possibility that it might make things worse contributed to our inability to make such a change. Fair enough, its a production environment. But as a developer, I get quickly frustrated by not being able to make changes to see if they have a positive effect. However, were we able to build up a new virtual server with the additional service packs and put it into production we would have minimal downtime (without needing a separate physical box to set up the software on) and should things become FUBAR, we could have easily replaced the previous VM.
Some of the features of VMware’s server products, such as VMotion are truly amazing! Imagine being able to migrate your VM from one physical server to another WHILST IT IS STILL RUNNING. Transparent, of course, to the end users. With the right hardware it is possible using VMware ESX Server. Anyway, this is starting to sound too much like a blatant sales pitch!
BTW, if you haven’t played around with the free VMware Player, do it now!!!! Check out the community-provided VM images; fancy playing around with a virtual install of Asterisk within your host Windows XP machine? VMware can do it.
Also, a great blog about virtualization trends is Alessandro Perilli’s virtualization.info.
Right, that’s all from me!
A little bit of Spring, makes your code Sing! January 11, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : software, java, development , add a commentAlthough I know it is EXTREMELY FREAKING UNCOOL to be using Spring and Java!, I feel its worth commenting on the announcement of the availability of Spring 2.0 milestone 1. We make extensive use of Spring at the day job, and feel it has been a key contributor to our extremely high code coverage, and the promotion of the ravioli code pattern; although some are of the opinion that ravioli code is an anti-pattern, I prefer smaller pieces loosely joined over the alternative.
I’m particularly keen on this bullet point:
Asynchronous JMS facilities enabling message-driven POJOs
Part of our system’s architecture involves POJOs receiving asynchronous messages via JMS. Until now Spring Remoting only supported JMS on the producer-side, not on the consumer, and we rolled our own message consumer (which is easy enough to do to be fair). I’m aware of Lingo, a complete JMS plugin for Spring, but at the moment it only supports JMS 1.1.4, no good if you are constrained to Weblogic 8.1 and JMS 1.0.2. A brief look at the code for Spring 2.0 shows that they are already building support for both versions of the spec.
It looks like the Spring team is also making an effort to streamline the XML grammar for configuring bean factories, which makes me happier… but I wonder if they would consider a YAML markup syntax?
Spelunking with Spunky Splunk January 10, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : software , 1 comment so farIf you have visited Sourceforge or Slashdot recently, you may have come across a banner ad for Splunk, “a search engine for your IT data.”
The day job had some challenging production issues which are now behind us, we hope! One of the key challenges we faced in diagnosing them however was the sheer mass of log data to wade through; several different app server logs, our own log files; all of which was being generated by several machines. On top of that, some of the logs have lines with different formats (no thanks to the proliferation of umpteen different logging libraries in the Java world).
It was almost providence that I happened upon Splunk. As it is *nix only (and this is a Windows shop) I was able to install it into the Browser Appliance (Ubuntu Breezy) virtual machine running under the free VMware Player. Its easy to upload log files via Splunk’s web interface, or you can modify an XML file to have Splunk Server monitor a number of directories for new log files which are transparently uploaded and indexed. The latter gives you greater opportunity for identifying which hosts are responsible for generating which logfiles. Hey Splunkers! Can we have a capability for doing all that via the web interface?
Splunk recognises a whole bunch of different file formats natively, but more importantly it can deal with multiline log messages. All log messages of a similar type are indexed under the same event type. Event types can then be tagged, a la Del.icio.us. Queries can be run across tags, time periods, hosts, etc, etc, etc. The Splunk Server is free, and they have a professional version that supports multiple users, saved queries, etc, etc, etc. Look, just go check out the demo already!