Checklist for Deployment

3 Checklist for Deployment

This appendix provides a checklist to get started on evaluation and production with the Eclipse GlassFish.

Checklist

Table 3-1 Checklist

Component/Feature Description

Application

Determine the following requirements for the application to be deployed.

  • Required/acceptable response time.

  • Peak load characteristics.

  • Necessary persistence scope and frequency.

  • Session timeout in web.xml.

  • Failover and availability requirements.

For more information see the Eclipse GlassFish Performance Tuning Guide.

Hardware

  • Have necessary amounts of hard disk space and memory installed.

  • Use the sizing exercise to identify the requirements for deployment.

For more information see the Eclipse GlassFish Release Notes

Operating System

  • Ensure that the product is installed on a supported platform.

  • Ensure that the patch levels are up-to-date and accurate.

For more information see the Eclipse GlassFish Release Notes

Network Infrastructure

  • Identify single points of failures and address them.

  • Make sure that the NICs and other network components are correctly configured.

  • Run ttcp benchmark test to determine if the throughput meets the requirements/expected result.

  • Setup ssh based your preference.

For more information see the Eclipse GlassFish Installation Guide.

Back-ends and other external data sources

Check with the domain expert or vendor to ensure that these data sources are configured appropriately.

System Changes/Configuration

  • Make sure that changes to /etc/system and its equivalent on Linux are completed before running any performance/stress tests.

  • Make sure the changes to the TCP/IP settings are complete.

  • By default, the system comes with lots of services pre-configured. Not all of them are required to be running. Turn off services that are not needed to conserve system resources.

  • On Solaris, use Setoolkit to determine the behavior of the system. Resolve any flags that show up.

For more information see the Eclipse GlassFish Performance Tuning Guide.

Installation

  • Ensure that these servers are not installed on NFS mounted volumes.

  • Check for enough disk space and RAM when installing Eclipse GlassFish.

Eclipse GlassFish Configuration

  • Enable access log rotation.

  • Choose the right logging level. WARNING is usually appropriate.

  • Configure Jakarta EE containers using the Administration Console.

  • Configure HTTP listeners using the Administration Console.

  • Configure ORB threadpool using the Administration Console.

  • Ensure that the appropriate persistence scope and frequency are used and they are not overridden underneath in the individual Web/EJB modules.

  • Ensure that only critical methods in the SFSB are checkpointed.

For more information on tuning, see the Eclipse GlassFish Performance Tuning Guide.

For more information on configuration, see the Eclipse GlassFish Administration Guide.

Load balancer Configuration

  • Make sure the load balancer have network access to the Server.

  • See documentation of your load balancer and verify that the configuration of the load balancer is correct.

Configuring usual attributes of load balancing algorithm

  • Endpoint - Address or host and port used for checks generating minimal possible load.

  • Response-time-out-in-seconds - How long the load balancer waits before declaring a Eclipse GlassFish instance unhealthy. Set this value based on the response time of the application. If set too high, the Web Server and load balancer plug-in wait a long time before marking a Eclipse GlassFish instance as unhealthy. If set too low and Eclipse GlassFish’s response time crosses this threshold, the instance will be incorrectly marked as unhealthy.

  • Interval-in-seconds - Time in seconds after which unhealthy instances are checked to find out if they have returned to a healthy state. Too low a value generates extra traffic from the load balancer plug-in to Eclipse GlassFish instances and too high a value delays the routing of requests to the instance that has turned healthy.

  • Timeout-in-seconds - Duration for a response to be obtained for a health check request. Adjust this value based on the traffic among the systems in the cluster to ensure that the health check succeeds.

Configuring time-outs in Eclipse GlassFish

  • Max-wait-time-millis - Wait time to get a connection from the pool before throwing an exception. Default is 6 s. Consider changing this value for highly loaded systems where the size of the data being persisted is greater than 50 KB.

  • Cache-idle-timeout-in-seconds - Time an EJB is allowed to be idle in the cache before it gets passivated. Applies only to entity beans and stateful session beans.

  • Removal-timeout-in-seconds - Time that an EJB remains passivated (idle in the backup store). Default value is 60 minutes. Adjust this value based on the need for SFSB failover.

Java Virtual Machine Configuration

  • Initially set the minimum and maximum heap sizes to be the same, and at least one GB for each instance.

  • When running multiple instances of Eclipse GlassFish, consider creating a processor set and bind Eclipse GlassFish to it. This helps in cases where the CMS collector is used to sweep the old generation.