CHAnge Management with Planning and Scheduling (CHAMPS)

CHAMPS Demo Screencam

The CHAMPS system research prototype is integrated into IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager/Intelligent Orchestrator (TIO/TPM), a commercial service provisioning system. A user interacts with CHAMPS through the TIO/TPM graphical user interface.

Case study: Automatic Rollout of a two-tiered SPECjAppServer2004 Enterprise Application

Our case study is based on the scenario of installing and configuring a multi-machine deployment of a J2EE based enterprise application and its supporting middleware software (including IBM’s HTTP Server, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ embedded messaging, DB2 UDB database and DB2 runtime client) on his behalf. The specific application we use is taken from the SPECjAppServer2004 enterprise application performance benchmark. It is a complex, multi-tiered on-line e-Commerce application that emulates an automobile manufacturing company and its associated dealerships.

SPECjAppServer2004 comprises typical manufacturing, supply chain and inventory applications that are implemented with web, EJB, messaging, and database tiers. We jointly refer to the SPECjAppServer2004 enterprise application, its data, and the underlying middleware as the SPECjAppServer2004 solution. Our SPECjAppServer2004 solution spans a multi-system environment, consisting of two systems: one hosts the application server along with the SPECjAppServer2004 J2EE application, whereas the second system runs the database system that hosts the various types of SPECjAppServer2004 data (catalog, orders, pricing, user data, etc.). One of the many challenges in deploying such a distributed solution consists in determining the proper order in which its individual components need to be deployed, installed, started and configured. This, in turn, requires a detailed understanding on how the various components need to be 'wired together' and how their requirements and capabilities can be matched.

View the CHAMPS Demo Screencam

Click here to play the (shortened to 1 Minute) Screencam file of a two-tiered SPECjAppServer 2004 deployment as Shockwave Flash (.swf) file. File size: about 9 MegaBytes (high-speed Internet connection recommended).

• Selection of the top-level deployment descriptor (IUDD) by a user and the specification of scheduling parameters.
• Parsing and recursive traversal of a set of linked IUDDs that describe the dependencies between the SPECjAppServer2004 application, data, and the underlying middleware.
• The deployment, installation and configuration of the individual software packages with call-outs showing the sizes of each software package that is being deployed. NOTE: In order to keep the size of the screencam low, the screencam runs at 9x the normal speed (see the stopwatch in the lower left corner). In addition, in scenes where an activity takes particularly long (e.g., during installation of the database server), the 'downtime' has been cut out.
• Stopwatch detailing the minutes/seconds/milliseconds to give an idea how long each of the deployment steps actually takes. It can be seen that the total time for deploying, installing and configuring the SPECjAppServer2004 application as well as its underlying middleware takes about 34 minutes.

NOTE: The creation of the change management workflows and their scheduling is not visible in this screencam as this happens automatically without requiring further user interactions.