Getting Started with vFabric Cloud Application Platform VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform 5.0 This document supports the version of each product listed and supports all subsequent versions until the document is replaced by a new edition. To check for more recent editions of this document, see http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs.
You can find the most up-to-date technical documentation on the VMware Web site at: https://www.vmware.com/ support. The VMware Web site also provides the latest product updates. If you have comments about this documentation, submit your feedback to: docfeedback@vmware.com Copyright © 2012 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http:// www.vmware.
Table of Contents 1. About Getting Started with vFabric Cloud Application Platform ....................................................................... 1 Intended Audience ......................................................................................................................... 1 2. Quick Start Guide .............................................................................................................................. 3 3. Introducing vFabric Cloud Application Platform 5.0 .........
iv vFabric Platform
About Getting Started with vFabric Cloud Application Platform 1 1. About Getting Started with vFabric Cloud Application Platform Getting Started with vFabric Cloud Application Platform describes product concepts and initial setup tasks for VMware® vFabric™ Cloud Application Platform. Read this documentation for an overview of platform components; to familiarize yourself with the licensing infrastructure; and to install the VMware® vFabric™ Standard or VMware® vFabric™ Advanced package.
2 vFabric Platform 2 About Getting Started with vFabric Cloud Application Platform
Quick Start Guide 3 2. Quick Start Guide This section guides you through the end-to-end process of installing vFabric Platform, or more specifically, installing two vFabric components on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) virtual machine in the context of vFabric Platform.
4 vFabric Platform e. Enter a name and description of the data source, then select the SQL Server you want this data source to connect to from the drop-down list. The SQL server can be either the one used by the vCenter Server or a separate one, whichever works best for your environment. Click Next. f. Specify that you want SQL server to verify the authenticity using a login ID and password entered by the user, then enter the Login ID and password of the SQL Server user.
Quick Start Guide 5 The installer program completes successfully when you see the message InstallShield Wizard Completed. f. 4. To view details of the installation, click Show the Windows Installer Log. Click Finish to complete the installation. Make a note of the license key that you purchased for vFabric Platform. See VMware Licensing Help Center for additional information about licensing. VMware license keys consist of groups of characters separated by dashes, such as 15243E1352-082DK-0TCH2-28D3G.
6 vFabric Platform The license keys are displayed in the main vCenter Licensing window under the name VMware vFabric Standard|Advanced, depending on the vFabric Platform package you purchased. 6. Install the vfabric-5-repo RPM on the RHEL VM. a. Log in to the RHEL VM as the root user and start a terminal. b. Run the rpm command to install the vfabric-5-repo from the VMware repository: prompt# rpm -Uvh http://repo.vmware.com/pub/rhel5/vfabric/5/vfabric-5-repo-5-2.noarch.
Quick Start Guide 7 See the Using Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J) section of the vFabric tc Server Administration Guide. After you start the instance and deploy a Web application to it, the memory management of the Java workload will be greatly improved as compared to using a non-EM4J enabled tc Runtime instance. • Create and start a vFabric Web Server instance. See the vFabric Web Server Installation and Configuration.
8 vFabric Platform 8 Quick Start Guide
Introducing vFabric Cloud Application Platform 5.0 9 3. Introducing vFabric Cloud Application Platform 5.0 The rise of cloud computing and IT as a service is driving dramatic changes in application infrastructure and development. VMware® vFabric™ Cloud Application Platform (vFabric Platform) embraces this shift by integrating the familiar Spring Developer Frameworks with a proven set of services that span the lifecycle of modern application development, deployment, and management.
10 vFabric Platform Component and Version Description vFabric Standard Component vFabric Advanced Component vFabric Hyperic 4.6 Proactive performance management with complete and constant visibility into applications and infrastructure. Yes. Yes. vFabric GemFire 6.6 Data management platform that provides real-time, consistent access to data across widely distributed cloud architectures. GemFire Application Cache Node is the vFabric Platform offering for vFabric GemFire. Yes. Yes.
Introducing vFabric Cloud Application Platform 5.0 11 • Commercial support for vFabric tc Server and Spring Framework. • Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J). Included with tc Server Spring Edition, EM4J allows Java workloads to cooperate more fully with ESXi advanced memory-sharing technologies. EM4J helps maintain Java application performance and reliability while freeing memory so you can run more VMs per host, improving your consolidation ratio.
12 vFabric Platform • Highly performant instrumentation with sub-microsecond impact to application response time, designed for applications in production. • Integration with Hyperic that enables operations and development teams to view a single set of both server-oriented and application-oriented performance, and collaborate more effectively to fix performance problems faster.
Introducing vFabric Cloud Application Platform 5.0 13 • Manage the lifecycle of tc Runtime instances by starting, stopping, and restarting a local or remote instance. • Manage the lifecycle of a group of tc Runtime instances that are distributed over a network of computers. • Configure a single instance of tc Runtime.
14 vFabric Platform • Client querying using parameters. • Combines redundancy, WAN replication, and a “shared nothing” persistence architecture to deliver fail-safe reliability and performance. • Continuous querying to provide active data change notifications. • Horizontally scalable to thousands of cache nodes, with multiple cache topologies to meet different enterprise needs. The cache can be distributed across multiple computers. • Support for asynchronous and synchronous cache update propagation.
Introducing vFabric Cloud Application Platform 5.0 15 • Sample template that automatically configures vFabric Web Server for a tc Server 2.6 instance. • Precompiled builds that deliver up to 100% performance improvements, increasing uptime and reducing costs for hardware capacity. • Guaranteed binary drop-in bug and security-fix help for every supported platform, to reduce the time you spend on security issues.
16 vFabric Platform This licensing model enables you to revise your application architecture for maximum performance and scalability with no licensing constraints. You do not need to track individual licenses for Web servers, application servers, and so on. You simply have a pool of vFabric VMs that you can deploy as needed. The dynamic nature of modern cloud and Web applications makes usage bursts typical and unavoidable. However, vFabric licensing is based on average usage.
vFabric Licensing 17 4. vFabric Licensing What type of licensing you get and how you activate it depends on whether you purchased your vFabric product(s) standalone or as part of a vFabric 5 package (Standard or Advanced). Production licensing in both cases requires a license key. A license key is an alphanumeric sequence of 25 characters that encodes details of the associated product, the license expiration date, the license capacity, and other information.
18 vFabric Platform whether it is valid for the latest release of the component or in the context of vFabric Platform. The vfabric-licensetool checkserial utility checks the validity of your existing license key. For each license key that you input, the utility displays detailed information such as the vFabric component to which it is associated, the type of license key, the capacity, and its expiration date. Procedure 1.
vFabric Licensing 19 Display the Component Events File in Readable Format Each vFabric component keeps an events file that records events such as when the component start and stop times, as well as when it used its license. This events log file is difficult to read in its raw form, so you can use the vfabric-licensetool printevents utility to display these events in a more readable format. Procedure 1.
20 vFabric Platform For example, to display event log information in readable fashion for a vFabric RabbitMQ component in which the events file is in its default location, run the following (Linux): prompt$ cd /opt/vfabric/utils/vfabric-vfchksn-1.0.1 prompt$ vfabric-licensetool printevents -f /opt/vmware/vFabric/vf.rmq-events.txt In the preceding example, it is implied that you unzipped the ZIP file into the /opt/vfabric/utils directory.
Installing vFabric Platform 21 5. Installing vFabric Platform Installing vFabric Platform is a multi-step process. The high-level steps are: 1. Install the vFabric License Server on the same VM on which your existing vCenter Server is installed. 2. Activate your vFabric licenses. 3. Install individual vFabric components (such as vFabric tc Server) on one or more virtual machines (VMs).
22 vFabric Platform See vSphere Installation and Setup. • If you plan to use a SQL Server database to store the vFabric License Server meta-data, ensure that the Windows computer on which vCenter Server is running has the SQL Server Native Client ODBC driver installed on it; if not, download and install the driver from the Microsoft SQL Server Web site.
Installing vFabric Platform 4. 23 Continue clicking Next to accept the license agreement and view where the installer will install the vFabric License Server. You cannot change the location of the vFabric License Server, which is a Web application and thus must be located in the webapps directory of the vCenter Tomcat instance. 5. Enter the login and password for the administrator of the vCenter Server installed on the same Windows VM, then click Next.
24 vFabric Platform Activate vFabric Platform Licenses VMware offers VMware V8 production licenses for the vFabric Standard and vFabric Advanced platform packages. The license is perpetual for a particular version and package of vFabric Platform. A vFabric Platform production license applies to virtual machines only. Prerequisites • Install vSphere 5 and set up vCenter. See the VMware vSphere product documentation. • Install vFabric license server on your vCenter Server.
Installing vFabric Platform 25 The license keys are displayed in the main vCenter Licensing window under the name VMware vFabric Standard| Advanced, depending on the vFabric Platform package you purchased. The vCenter Licensing page displays only the capacity of your vFabric Platform license; it does not actually keep track of the number of licenses currently assigned. See Monitor vFabric License Usage for information on using the monitoring commands.
26 vFabric Component vFabric Platform RPM Package Name Installation Directory User Group Notes as access to Spring Insight Operations. The RPM install also adds a tc-server non-interactive user that you can use to create tc Runtime instances and so on. Spring Insight Operations (Dashboard) vfabric-insightdashboard /opt/vmware/ vfabric-tcserver-standard/ templates/ insightdashboard root tc-server Spring Insight (Dashboard) is installed as a template of vFabric tc Server.
Installing vFabric Platform vFabric Component RPM Package Name vFabric GemFire vfabric-gemfire vFabric SQLFire 27 Installation Directory User Group Notes /usr/lib/vmware/ gemfire gemfire gemfire The /usr/lib/ vmware/gemfire directory is a symbolic link to a sibling versioned directory, such as / user/lib/vmware/ vFabric_GemFire_66. vfabric-sqlfire /opt/vfabric/ sqlfire sqlfire sqlfire SQLFire requires a Java JDK or JRE. Either be sure your VM has one already installed, or install one.
28 vFabric Platform • vfabric-all-repo: Contains additional vFabric component RPMs that have released after vFabric Platform 5 released, such as maintenance releases of components. These RPMs may not necessarily be certified to work with those of vFabric 5 (stored in the vfabric-5-repo repository). Additionally, the RPMs in vfabric-all-repo might be used by customers who have not bought a vFabric 5 Standard or Advanced license.
Installing vFabric Platform 29 Procedure 1. If you want to use an external database (instead of the internal PostgreSQL database) to store Hyperic meta-data, set up the database and make note of the JDBC URL for connecting to the database as well as the database username and password. See the vFabric Hyperic documentation for details on how to set up a MySQL or Oracle database for Hyperic use. 2.
30 vFabric Platform HQ_ADMIN_EMAIL_ADDRESS=hqadmin@eng.mycompany.com The following table lists all the vFabric Hyperic Server properties that you can include in the properties file. Table 5.2. vFabric Hyperic Server Properties Property Description BUILT_IN_POSTGRESQL Whether Hyperic Server should use the local built-in PostgreSQL database instead of an external database. Specify yes or no.
Installing vFabric Platform 31 Prerequisites • Install vFabric License Server on your vCenter Server. • Activate vFabric Platform licenses in your vCenter Server. • Create a virtual machine and install the RHEL guest operating system. See vSphere Virtual Machine Administration. • Install the vFabric Repository RPMs. • If you will install vFabric Hyperic Server, read Pre-Installation Instructions for vFabric Hyperic Server.
32 vFabric Platform • If you installed Spring Insight Operations, see Post-Installation Instructions for Spring Insight Operations (Agent and Dashboard). • If you installed Web Server, see Post-Installation Instructions for Web Server. • If you installed GemFire, see Post-Installation Instructions for GemFire. • If you installed SQLFire, see Post-Installation Instructions for SQLFire. • If you installed RabbitMQ, see Post-Installation Instructions for RabbitMQ.
Installing vFabric Platform 33 prompt$ ./tcruntime-instance.sh create -i /home/tcs/instances myserver 6. Execute the tcruntime-ctl.sh command to start the new tc Runtime instance. Use the -n option to specify the directory in which you created the instance. For example: prompt$ ./tcruntime-ctl.sh -n /home/tcs/instances myserver start 7. Confirm that the tc Runtime instance is running by invoking its Welcome page in a browser.
34 6. vFabric Platform Execute the tcruntime-ctl.sh command to start the new tc Runtime instance. Use the -n option to specify the directory in which you created the instance. For example: prompt$ ./tcruntime-ctl.sh -n /home/tcs/instances mydashboard start 7. Confirm that the tc Runtime instance is running by invoking its Welcome page in a browser. Use the URL http://host:8080, where host is the name or IP address of the computer on which the tc Runtime instance is running (localhost if local).
Installing vFabric Platform 35 Post-Installation Instructions for Web Server The yum installation of vFabric Web Server does not automatically create a Web Server instance, so you must manually create one before you can start using it to serve up your Web pages. Procedure 1. Log in to the RHEL VM on which you installed vFabric Web Server as the root user and open a terminal window. 2. Change to the /opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server directory: prompt# cd /opt/vmware/vfabric-web-server 3.
36 3. vFabric Platform Optionally specify that the vfabric-sqlfire process should automatically start when the operating system starts by running the following command: prompt# chkconfig --level 35 vfabric-sqlfire on 4. Optionally specify the configuration of the vfabric-sqlfire process by editing the file /etc/sysconfig/ sqlfire, which is the file sourced by the script that you will later use to start the SQLFire process (/etc/init.d/ vfabric-sqlfire.
Installing vFabric Platform 37 prompt# mkdir /usr/java prompt# ln -s /opt/java/jdk1.6.0_23 /usr/java/default You perform this step only once. 4. Become the rabbitmq user using the Linux su command: prompt# su - rabbitmq You cannot login directly as the rabbitmq user because interactive login for the rabbitmq user has been disabled. 5. Start and stop the RabbitMQ server using the /sbin/service rabbitmq-server command, passing it the appropriate option.
38 vFabric Platform Post-Installation Instructions for Hyperic Agent The yum installation of Hyperic Agent configured your RHEL VM so that Hyperic Agent starts automatically when the VM is booted; in particular, it created a /etc/init.d/hyperic-hqee-agent init script. Before you can start the Hyperic Agent, however, you must configure it so it can find the Hyperic Server to which you want it to connect. The following procedure describes how to do this, and then how to start the Agent manually.
Installing vFabric Platform 39 agent.setup.camPort=7080 agent.setup.camSSLPort=7443 agent.setup.camSecure=yes agent.setup.camLogin=hqadmin agent.setup.camPword=hqadmin agent.setup.agentIP=*default* agent.setup.agentPort=*default* agent.setup.resetupTokens=no agent.setup.acceptUnverifiedCertificate=yes 4. Open a terminal window and execute the /etc/init.d/hyperic-hqee-agent script, passing it the start parameter: prompt# /etc/init.
40 vFabric Platform 2. Install a JDK or JVM on the VM's guest operating system. tc Server and EM4J require Java 1.6. 3. Update the JAVA_HOME and PATH environment variables of the user who installs tc Server. For example, if you installed the JDK in /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_24, you can set the environment variables in the user's Linux profile as follows: export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_24 export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH 4.
Installing vFabric Platform 2. 41 Run the desired monitoring command; see Command Reference for a table that lists all the commands along with their required or optional parameters. For example, run the usage-over-periods.bat command to display vFabric license usage over a period of time. You must specify the start and end dates of the time period, as well as the period, such as monthly or yearly. prompt> usage-over-periods.
42 Monitoring Command vFabric Platform Description • -cluster cluster-name: Displays current usage and capacity information for the specified cluster. • -datacenter datacenter-name: Displays current usage and capacity information for the specified virtual data center. current-versions.bat Displays the current number of virtual machines that are running each vFabric component included in vFabric Platform. By default, the command displays information for the entire vCenter Server.
Installing vFabric Platform 43 Prerequisites • From the Windows VM on which you are running vCenter Server, download the new version of the vFabric License Server installer program from the VMware Download Center and save it to your computer. The installer program is called vFabric_License_Server-version.exe. Procedure 1. On the same Windows VM on which you are running vCenter Server, double-click the vFabric License Server installer program from Windows Explorer to start the upgrade.
44 vFabric Platform prompt$ ./tcruntime-ctl.sh myserver stop See the specific vFabric component documentation for details about stopping a component or an instance of a component. Procedure 1. On the RHEL VM on which you are going to upgrade the vFabric component, start a terminal either as the root user or as an unprivileged user using sudo. 2. Execute the appropriate yum upgrade component command to upgrade the vFabric component, where component is name of the RPM package for the component.
