In addition to all the significant functional enhancements noted in several previous blogs about IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) v7.0, there are many important changes and improvements related to enterprise deployment.  Some of these were previewed in Get Ready for IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management v7.0.

DOORS Next:  The big news coming in ELM v7.0 is about requirements data scalability. ELM v7.0 moves the main work of storing versioned information and querying it out of Apache Jena and into your relational database.  This significantly reduces the hardware resources needed for the DOORS Next server while putting some additional load on the database server.

Separate the Link Index (LDX) and Global Configuration Management (GCM) services from Jazz Team Server (JTS): For optimal scale, we recommended separate servers for the GCM and LDX services (rather than using the same server as the JTS, which is the default configuration).

Deploy a combined Engineering Workflow Manager (EWM) and Rhapsody Model Manager (RMM) server:  With v7.0, RMM is presented in the launchpad and installer as the Architecture Management extensions for the EWM application allowing a combined deployment.  For administrators it means one less server; for practitioners, it offers new flexibility to manage models, source code, documentation, and other files in the same components, streams, baselines, and snapshots.

Cluster Engineering Test Management (ETM) and combined EWM+RMM server:  Joining the EWM application, which became clusterable in v6.0.5, are ETM and the combined EWM+RMM servers, which provide greater user concurrency through horizontal scalability.

Guidance on Microsoft SQL Server with DOORS Next:  If you use Microsoft SQL Server and you exceed any of the following criteria, we recommend you contact your IBM or IBM business partner representative to request a discussion about planning for scale and best performance. We have observed a general pattern in which clients exceeding these criteria are more often successful when using Db2 or Oracle. If managing a Db2 or Oracle environment is not an option in your organization, we recommend considering a private cloud deployment managed by IBM or one of our business partners.

• 300 concurrent users across all ELM applications using the same SQL Server database
• Database size of 700GB or more
• 1M requirements or more
• 10 – 25 Global Configuration contributions (aka “local configurations”) in a Global Configuration tree

This is not a strict rule; rather it’s a suggestion to clients to actively manage their technical risk related to performance and to engage with IBM or their preferred business partner to ensure they are taking advantage of all existing means to optimize performance when using SQL Server.

New JMX MBeans:  One of our best practices for administering ELM environments is to establish an enterprise monitoring strategy that is inclusive of application monitoring (which we started supporting via JMX MBeans in 6.0.3).  With the increased complexity of ELM deployments, especially with the use of global configuration management and at the ever-increasing size and scale we are seeing, customers must monitor their ELM environments.  In 7.0, MBeans were added in DOORS Next to track statistics about data shape (e.g. total artifacts, components, configurations, baselines, etc.) at both the repository and project level.  GCM added MBeans and a metrics page to track information about the size and shape of global configuration hierarchies at a repository and project level.  Additionally, MBeans were added for Lifecycle Query Engine query load metrics.

ELM 7.0 integrations:

Platform adds/drops:

Tim Feeney
Executive IT Specialist, IBM Engineering