Deployment Workshops and Reviews in Detail

Deployment workshops and reviews

A typical 2 day deployment workshop or review for an enterprise scale Rational development environment:

IBM Rational software supports deployment workshops and reviews pre- and post-sales.

Sample Agenda

[CLIENT] Technical Deployment Review Workshop
[Location]
[Date(s)]

This workshop focuses on technical rather than organizational deployment:

• Technical deployment of Rational products and solutions which includes: planning, designing, installing, configuring, integrating, upgrading and administering Rational development environments that are: flexible, scalable, performance, available, resilient, secure and supportable.
• Organizational deployment which includes technical deployment, but also includes the business change, adoption, best practices, enablement and the whole Rational field engagement need to improve an organizations development capability.

However, technical deployment needs to be mindful of the requirements and constraints imposed by organizational deployment.

The workshop would start by reviewing the existing deployment at [CLIENT] and by understanding the business and technical requirements, and constraints that the environment must support now and in the future as they roll it out to more development teams.

This workshop is conducted as a face-to-face in person meeting, and will investigate all relevant aspects of technical deployment in a structured way. For each aspect we will:

• Clarify the requirement and constraints
• Understand [CLIENT]'s preferred approach and technology
• Understand what has been deployed to date and what challenges or issues [CLIENT] has
• Discuss options and make key recommendations to meet [CLIENT]'s requirements, constraints and needs.

Note: Times in this agenda are based upon local time [EST].

Note: Topics and links listed are examples of material that will be discussed. There may be other topics that will be discussed which aren’t listed here. Similarly not all topics listed here may in actuality be discussed. Frequent checkpoints during the actual workshop will refine and adjust the agenda and required topics as necessary.

Location: [CLIENT] or IBM location

Attendees: [CLIENT]

IBM

Agenda Day 1, [Date]: Understand current situation, future strategy and plans

• 09:00 - 09:30 Introductions, review agreed scope, focus and agenda
  • Introductions, roles
  • This agenda document and any specific required scope and focus will be reviewed
  • Finalize topics, times and breaks

• 09:30 - 10:00 Present and discuss key consideration when designing the technical deployment of IBM Rational environments
  • IBM to present using the Deployment planning: Where to start? topic in the Deployment wiki.

• 10:00 – 12:00 Review existing technical deployment and understand general requirement, constraints and usage; Review current development environment
  • [CLIENT] to present with active discussion:
  • Current #users, location distribution, roles
  • Future #users, location distribution, roles
  • Required and current Availability requirements
  • Required Mean Time to Recovery, Recovery Point Objective, Recovery Time Objective etc.
  • Development disciplines that need to be supported
  • 3rd part integration and migration we need to support
  • Security, audit and compliance requirements
  • Review future strategy and plans.
  • [CLIENT] to lead discussion and reference the background documentation given to IBM Rational

• 12:00 – 13:00 Lunch

• 13:00 – 14:30 Understand in detail [CLIENT]'s existing infrastructure services and preferred middleware/platforms – review and make key platform, OS and middleware decisions/recommendations
  • Database, platform, virtualization, HA/DR including back-up etc.
  • [CLIENT] to outline their existing infrastructure services
  • Start confirming topics to be discussed on Day 2 in greater depth

• 14:30 – 16:00 Discuss deployment topology, technology and platform options based upon [CLIENT]'s preferred approach and technology, and available common services
  • Standard deployment topologies overview wiki topic and sub-topic pages will be the guidance and best practice this session is based upon:
  • Collaborative Lifecycle Management architecture overview
  • Planning for multiple Jazz application server instances
  • Principles of good virtualization
  • Understanding reverse proxy
    • Proxy server installation landing page
  • Using content caching proxies for Jazz Source Control – Improve SCM read performance from remote locations
  • System Requirements for IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) 6.0.2
  • Jazz licensing explained – Discuss license and license server options for an Enterprise development environment
• Continue confirming topics to be discussed on Day 2 in greater depth

• 16:00 – 17:00 Review progress, refine Day 2 agenda
  • Review surfaced issues, recommendations and actions
  • Refine Day 2 agenda
  • Adjust topics, timeslots as needed
  • Wrap-up Day 1

Agenda Day 2, [Date]: Detailed discussion of decisions to be made; in-depth topics

• 09:00 – 10:00 Review and refine Day 2 agenda
  • Review surfaced issues, recommendations and actions
  • Refine Day 2 agenda
  • Adjust topics and timeslots

• 10:00 – 12:00 Capacity planning, performance and monitoring
  • !CLM Sizing Strategy wiki topic will be used as the guidance and best practice for capacity planning
  • Performance datasheets wiki page and containing topic pages will be used as the guidance and best practice for performance
    • Improving the performance of Rational Team Concert by using the dynamic cache service in WebSphere Application Server
  • Discuss developing a production development environment wide monitoring configuration, which combines user and automated usage with CLM Server Monitoring, database, application server and systems monitoring information for the production development environment to produce a correlated dashboard. Ultimately the key monitoring that needs to be combined to produce a correlated dashboard includes:
    • Concurrent user usage via licensing monitoring from the JTS, IBM Rational License Key Server or preferably the Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting tool
    • CLM Server Monitoring
    • WAS monitoring
    • Database server monitoring
    • VMware monitoring
    • General systems performance monitoring
  • Monitoring: Where to Start? Wiki topic and Monitoring section of the wiki will be used as the guidance and best practice for monitoring

• 12:00 – 13:00 Lunch

• 13:00 – 14:00 High availability and disaster recovery
  • Approaches to implementing high availability and disaster recovery for Rational Jazz environments wiki topic and sub-topic pages will be the guidance and best practice this session is based upon:
    • Strategies for backup of the Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution and Environment
    • Understanding how to install manual failover techniques with the Jazz solution
    • Implementing application recovery: Example script for a Jazz deployment on WebSphere

• 14:00 – 15:00 Administration, configuring, tuning and over-flow topics
  • Roles and responsibilities of Rational Tools Administration Team
  • How to provide an enhanced development environment service
  • Implementation planning and deployment roadmap wiki topic and sub-topic pages will be the guidance and best practice this session is based upon:
    • Establishing a systems and software engineering ecosystem center of excellence
    • Accelerating adoption of software tools and practices
    • Deployment monitoring and tracking
  • Patch service for CLM applications
  • Upgrade planning
  • Upgrade best practice based upon IBM experience

• 15:00 – 16:00 Review and wrap-up workshop
  • Review surfaced issues, recommendations and follow-on actions
  • Review format of final deliverable

Prerequisites, constrains and background for the workshop

1. [CLIENT] to provide existing Rational technical deployment planning and design documentation for review prior to the workshop
2. The local IBM Rational Team will support all activities prior, during and after the workshop for business and technical understanding and continuity
3. [CLIENT] and IBM Rational will ensure that the right Tools and Infrastructure Administrators, Architects and Specialists can fully support the workshop sessions.
4. IBM Rational will produce a short review report with key recommendations after the workshop.

Related topics: Deployment web home, Deployment web home

External links:

• IBM

Additional contributors: TWikiUser, TWikiUser