Devoxx advertising

As I am going to talk at Devoxx, I will also help to promote the conference by putting a banner online:



Click on it to get to the registration page

Clustering work in RHQ and Jopr

My colleague Joseph recently wrote about cluster management in upcoming RHQ 1.2. Don't confuse this with the cluster work we have done for RHQ 1.1, where we added the clustering of the RHQ server itself.
The goal in RHQ 1.2 is to be able to cluster resources together and operate on them. You will probably say that this is already possible with compatible groups. But this is only half of the truth. Go and read Joe's posting.

In addition to the RHQ side, we will also work on clustering JBoss AS servers in the Jopr project. I have set up an initial requirements document for this. I am looking forward to your comments on this.

Managing a cluster of JBossAS servers includes a big part of managing JBoss Cache instances and their underlying JGroups infrastructure.

I've started a JBoss Cache plugin for Jopr some time ago. If you are interested, check it out and use it in RHQ / Jopr and Embedded Jopr.

Red Hat News | Project Jopr: JBoss Operations Network Now Open Source

After we released Jopr last week and even had an announcement on TheServerSide (My first posting there!), there is now an official Red Hat press release:

Red Hat News | Project Jopr: JBoss Operations Network Now Open Source.

Cool!

And btw.: I even added a first 'draft' of a JBoss Cache plugin to Jopr since then.

Qype - where is the content?

I am a heavy user of Qype and have already contributed quite a lot, but recently the site is overloaded. And worse: you don't even find the content anymore:

(Click for a larger image)

You can see that the place has 4 stars on average. You can see that you can win something, you have a place to comment, you can book an ad for this place but where is the content, that made up the 4 stars?

Well, the solution is here:

There is only content in French, so it is hidden from me - and only when I open that popup, I will see that there is actually content. This sucks!

And for my 1280x800 display, this page is just too full. The page layout has been a lot better in the past.

Jopr - JBoss Operations Network 2 goes open source too

You have heard about JBoss Operations Network 2?
Then you probably also know that RHQ is its upstream project (like in the Fedora / Red Hat Enterprise Linux case).

Jopr

If you had a look at JBoss ON 2, you have surely also seen that RHQ does not have all the features, JBoss ON 2 has (namely monitoring and management of JBossAS was missing).

This hole has now been closed by Jopr. Jopr closes the gap between RHQ and JBoss ON 2, builts on RHQ as its infrastructure framework and serves as open source upstream for JBoss ON 2

You can find it at http://www.jboss.org/jopr/.

Forums are also available for Jopr

Embedded Jopr

Next to Jopr we have another thing coming for you: Embedded Jopr. This is a new management console for JBossAS instances that shares parts of the underlying infrastructure and plugins with RHQ and Jopr. You can deploy and use it on JBoss AS 4.2.x, as described on the install page.

Embedded Jopr has its home page at https://www.jboss.org/embjopr/.

Forums for Embedded Jopr also live on jboss.org

Join us ...

The Jopr team has registered #jopr on irc.freenode.net, so come an join us there (as well as on #rhq on the same server network).

Fady talking about RHQ and JBossON @ Gitex in Dubai

My colleague Fady Matar will give a talk about SOA and JBoss ON at Gitex conference in Dubai.

You can find out more about his talk on his blog.

1.1.0 Release - RHQ-Project

RHQ 1.1.0 has been released!

My colleague Joseph Marques has written a summary article about the contents and scope of this release:

1.1.0 Release - RHQ-Project

As you already know RHQ is also the upstream for JBoss ON 2, so you can expect more in the following days (especially as the availability of JBoss ON 2.1 has been announced for this month already).

Joseph lists major improvements in his article, one being support for Java 6. So this actually means that you can now run a fully open source Java Management and Monitoring system:

• Open source operating system like Fedora Linux


• Open source java as in OpenJDK / IcedTea


• Open source database Postgres (version 8.2.4+)


• RHQ

And of course you can get support for this whole stack from your preferred Open Source company: Red Hat !

RHQ 1.1 has been tagged GA -- and brings High Availability

The RHQ code base has been tagged with the GA (General Availability) tag for release 1.1 and brings a lot of new features and improvements. Most notably this includes High Availability (HA) for the servers.

What does this HA mean? Well, you can now have multiple servers in a server cloud that handle incoming agent connections. If one of the servers fails or is put into maintenance mode, the agent will transparently fail over to another server in the cloud.

Setup of HA is also quite easy: just upgrade to RHQ 1.1 and it comes for free. When you add a 2nd server and have it point to the same back end database, it will automatically join the server cloud.

You need to pay attention to two things though:

• All hosts for agents and servers need to have valid forward and reverse mappings in RHQ 1.1 -- even if you don't use HA
  
• If you are using more than one server, you obviously need to increase the allowed connections on your database.
  

And as always: make sure that the clocks of the involved machines are in sync (e.g. by using ntp).

Watch out for more upcoming posts about RHQ 1.1 and JBoss ON 2.1, which was announced for this october too.

Upcoming speaking engagements (updated)

If you want to get the latest news on RHQ and JBoss ON 2, join me on the following dates:

• 11.11. SIG JBoss of Java User Group Switzerland: JBossON Management platform and RHQ, its internal infrastructure library. This talk is together with Bela Ban, who will talk about clustering.


• 9.12. Devoxx conference:
  
  
  
  • Systems management with Project RHQ (and JBoss ON of course :-)
    
  • Profiler, the better debugger?
    
  
  
• 12.1.2009: Munich JBoss user group about RHQ -- still tentative.
  

I am looking forward to meet as many of you as possible.