This customer’s key challenge was how to manage the migration of one of their biggest IBM WebSphere Message Broker applications, ‘Integration Broker’ – supporting 1000+ interfaces, to version 7.0 of WMB (and then future releases moving forward). Their existing processes were entirely manual and recognized to be not only extremely time-consuming, but also prone to inaccuracies. They identified the need for an Application Release Automation tool.
Although they had already purchased IBM Rational Build Forge Enterprise Edition, the IBM Rational Automation Framework was only being used for a small number of WebSphere Application Server instances. They also looked at a competing solution from BMC, BladeLogic ARA, but this was discounted due to lack of support for IBM WebSphere Message Broker.
Initially, IBM and MidVision Partner, Haddon Hill Group showed them how to migrate distributed WebSphere Application Server applications to z/Linux using RAF and then the conversation developed into configuration capture and management for WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere MQ and the MidVision Extensions were introduced. Several use cases were defined and demonstrated remotely by MidVision:
- Capture a configuration from a WebSphere Message Broker server
- Capture configuration from a WebSphere MQ server
- Compare the configurations from the above two with other Message Broker or MQ servers (showing configuration drift)
- Install WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere MQ binaries on net new LPARs
- Execute captured WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere MQ server configurations on previously created LPARs
The purchase of the MidVision extensions was made as part of an ELA amendment in Q411 and implementation will start early in 2012.
