IS02 revisited – version 3 released

For those of you who don’t know that much about IS02 here’s the short-short summary:

• Can administer (deploy to multiple eg’s at once, start/stop flows, create/delete execurtiongroups) local and remote brokers
• Support SSL connection to the configuration manager queue manager
• Can subscribe to and present statistics and accounting data. The drawback here is that access to an unsecured SYSTEM.DEF.SVRCONN is required (an mqm nightmare)
• Integrated with the WMQ Explorer (showing broker, configuration manager and mq objects side by side)

Back in may I wrote a post on the IS02 support pack. The background story was a customer of mine who currently set up multiple message brokers (WebSphere Message Broker) in an active-active cluster utilizing WebSphere MQ workload balancing features.

From a management/tool view-point the message broker has been all but complete. I was very excited to try out the IS02 support pack as it’s a lean alternative to the all-but-lean Message Broker Toolkit.

The previous post covered the functionality of version two, the version three of IS02: WebSphere Message Broker Explorer Plug-in was released a couple of days ago and today I gave it a shot.

The conclusion is (based on a setup where the configuration manager is installed on a separate box from the eclipse platform):

• Your configuration data (configuration manager connection) is now persisted and wil appear after restart of the eclipse platform.
• Message sets still can’t be removed
• You still need do create sender and receiver channels despite the fact that you’re using WebSphere MQ clusters where the broker(s) and configuration manager’s queue managers are within the same cluster.

So, a bit better but more need to come before this becomes really useful.

Filed under: ibm, is02, websphere, wmb

IS02 in WebSphere MQ clustered environment

In my current assignment I’m architecting “a version two” of my customers corporate ESB.

These core components that make up the actual ESB runtime:

1. WebSphere Message Broker 6.0.0.3
2. WebSphere MQ 6.0.2.1

As a part of the architectural work I needed to look into the management possibilities of the components. I’ve been working with both WMQ 5.3 and WBIMB 5.0 before but newer the 6.0’s.

What I wanted to do, if possible, was to use the IS02 support pack in favor the WebSphere Message Broker Toolkit to administer the broker domains. The Toolkit is based on Eclipse and includes both administration and development capabilities (a huge overhead for pure operational tasks).

The runtime setup as follows (BK=Broker, CM=Configuration Manager, QM=Queue Manager):

• Server1: BK1/QM1 + CM/QM2
• Server2: BK2/QM3
• QM1, QM2 and QM3 is part of Cluster1

Objectives: Use IS02 to connect to CM (through QM2) and administer BK1 and BK2 from Workstation1.

Result:

IS02 (v2 – the current one) doesn’t work in a clustered environment (one without XMIT queues and sender/receiver (non-cluster) channels. The senders (QM2 to QM1 and QM2 to QM3) channel is needed on QM2 for the tooling to display the brokers. The receiver corresponding receiver channels are needed to administer the brokers (sending messages basically)

Well, I set up the XMIT’s and channel’s and tried again. The brokers and configuration manager is nicely shown in the IS02 eclipse plugin. You can do the things you can expect like deploying (to multiple execution groups “concurrently”) , starting,  stopping and removing flows etc.

Still some things doesn’t work as expected:

• Message Set’s can be removed from a broker but that isn’t reflected in the UI (need restart)
• The configuration to connect to the Configuration Manager vanish the moment the Eclipse environment is restarted.

Based on what I’ve heard at IBM the problems should hopefully be fixed in the upcoming release.

Filed under: ibm, is02, mq, support pack, wmb, wmq