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.
Maximum flexibility for the future: The ELM solution supports a variety of web application servers, middleware, operating systems, and databases. For maximum flexibility to adopt new advanced features and to simplify a potential move in the future to or from:
- IBM ELM on Cloud SaaS
- IBM ELM as a Managed Service
- IBM ELM containerized on RedHat OpenShift “Project Slipstream” currently under development
We recommend the following:
- In all cases, we strongly recommend deploying new environments using WebSphere Liberty. If you currently use WebSphere Application Server, we recommend migrating to WebSphere Liberty when you next upgrade your ELM servers
- If your enterprise can support RedHat Enterprise Linux, then we recommend using that
- Some advanced capabilities require IBM IoT MessageSight, which requires at least one server running RedHat Enterprise Linux x86-64
- If your organization can support IBM Db2 or Oracle, then we recommend using one of these databases for new environments
- We plan to support IBM Db2 and Oracle databases with ELM on RedHat OpenShift “Project Slipstream”
- We have been seeing excellent performance results with DOORS Next 7.0 and Oracle 19c
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:
EWM Team Concert Jenkins Plug-in integration: In ELM 7.0 the Team Concert Plugin supports Jenkins LTS 2.60.x through Jenkins LTS 2.164.x, which means some much older Jenkins versions before v2.60.x will no longer be supported in EWM 7.0
Git EWM client/server integration: In EWM 7.0 our work item to Git integration adds support for Bitbucket in addition to existing support for Git, GitHub, GitLab, and Gerrit. Bitbucket support is on-premise only, as we do not support Webhooks with Bitbucket today. We have also streamlined our support for Git* variants dropping support for older Git versions including GitHub 2.9. GitLab 8, GitLab 7, Git 1.7.9 and Gerrit 2.13, 2.12, 2.11 and 2.10 while adding support for the newest versions. We also are dropping older Git integration architectures to focus on our Node.js based integration architecture. This allows us to provide automated scripts for setting up the integration and reduce the complexity of setup.
Microsoft Visual Studio IDE support: In the EWM 7.0 release we re-wrote our Visual Studio extension to support asynchronous loading for faster start-up performance. EWM 7.0 supports Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019. Support for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 was dropped. Note that by default Visual Studio 2019 blocks any synchronously auto-loaded extension.
Platform adds/drops:
Databases
- Added Oracle 19c (12.2.0.3) drop Oracle 11g (keep Oracle 12c R1 and R2)
(large-scale DB partitioning supported in Oracle 19c Enterprise only) - Added SQL Server 2017 and dropped SQL Server 2014 (keeping SQL Server 2016)
- Added Db2 11.5 and dropped Db2 10.x (keep Db2 11.1)
Application Servers
- Dropped Tomcat support completely (but still being used by DOORS Web Access)
- Added WAS 9.0.x and forward (WAS 9.0.5 or later) and dropped WAS 8.5.5.x
- Included Liberty 19.0.0.6
- Continue to build with and bundle Java SDK V8
Browsers
- Added new Firefox 68 ESR and latest three Chrome releases, added Safari 13 and dropped Safari 11
Client and Server OS
- Dropped Windows 7
- Added Windows Server 2019 and dropped Windows Server 2012 (keeping Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2016)
- Added RedHat 8.x Server and drop RedHat 6.x (keeping RedHat 7.x)
- Dropped SUSE 11 (keeping SUSE 12 on x86)
Licensing: It’s no longer necessary to go to the License Key Center to get Jazz Activation kits for authorized or floating users. Instead, they are included in the IBM Passport Advantage download packages. You still need to go to the License Key Center if you use token license Activation Kits.
Key deployment wiki updates: Some of the important updates to the Jazz deployment wiki since the post Noteworthy technical deployment insights recently captured on the deployment wiki include the following.
Installation and Upgrade
- System requirements for ELM 7.0
- Migrating the Requirements Management application link validity data in a single-server topology
- Configure Secure LDAP with Liberty and WebSphere for ELM Applications
- Configuring CLM Authentication with a third Party OIDC provider
- Configure CA and Self-Signed Certificates in Liberty and IHS for ELM Applications
- Non-functional considerations when adopting IBM ELM solution for global configuration management (coming soon)
- Setup Load Balancing For Multiple LQEs
Performance and Scalability
- DOORS Next 7.0 performance guide
- Performance impact of combining RMM and EWM servers
- Scaling the configuration-aware reporting environment (coming soon)
- Understanding the performance of SQL statements in Oracle
- Disk benchmarking
Usage Model / Best Practices
Tim Feeney
Executive IT Specialist, IBM Engineering
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[…] What’s new in IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management 7.0 enterprise deployments blog highlights many of the non-functional (e.g. deployment, performance, scalability, serviceability) enhancements in ELM 7.0 in addition to all the functional updates. […]