UKOUG Tech 2013 – Weblogic Java and Middleware 2

During this last day I also decided to follow the Middleware stream. I have continued to learn about future Oracle product strategies. In the web tier layer, Oracle will continue to support I planet web server but without adding new added value features inside. They insisted on the fact that OHS (Oracle HTTP Server) is still, and will be the preferred Oracle product as a web server.

OHS is derived from Apache the famous free/open source web server. Answer was also not totally clear, but it seems that one plug-in compiled for standard Apache, will also be executable within OHS.

Other interesting thing is the ongoing development of Oracle Traffic Director. This product is a software base load balancer (and other enhanced features) especially fitted for OHS and Oracle Fusion Middleware products. However, it can also be integrated with other TCP-based services.

In Weblogic 12c, there is a new interesting feature, the Dynamic Cluster management.

In few words, we first have to register a pool of physical/virtual machines, and Weblogic Admin server will be able to dynamically increase the size of a cluster on them. You can define several metrics, where Weblogic will take care about and determine if more resources are needed to handle the flow of requests (Messages, HTTP requests, etc…)

We attended a quick demo, where we have seen the number of managed servers increasing, on the fly, according to the number of requests. However, once the flow finished, newly created managed servers were not deleted, but only shutdown.

Obviously you can set a limit for a maximum of Managed server the Admin server can create, and configuration of the managed are coming from a template.

This feature is still available in Weblogic 12.2, but we also need to configure other properties beside to get it working. Normally in release 12.4, Dynamic Cluster will be configurable easier.