Best WebLogic Platform Design

Intro to Infrastructure Design

The infrastructure design goal to setup a platform that will be serve the customer needs. This platform designing you can do when you clear idea about what business requirement and how much business is expecting network traffic through internal, external, third-party tie-ups.

Secure implementation Entire platform treated as box, that need to given access through single point of entry. This entry should protect the secure data and allow user only that authenticated to view. This is all about DNS filtering, caching, HTTP/HTTPS traffic controlling at the global load balancer level.

Handle the bandwidth: In this the traffic management will be Local level. This is could be handled with a cluster of Traffic managers. This level also web projects are going to manage sessions with the end users need the caching in this level too.

Serve the business required components: This is where the Application team provided/suggested components will be deployed to serve the customer required functionality. Here the Middleware layer take the role and it may need UCM, E-Biz, SOA suite or WebCenter components or any Fusion Middleware component. The base is WebLogic platform. So we must configure with all possible standards implemented and Oracle recommendations with respect to the chosen version compatibility certificate of matrix provided in Oracle site.

Every platform the data transact between web client and reach to the end point either to a file or to a database table. Disk crash should not impact the end-user at any time. Here maintaining redundant data is the strategy for data layer failover. Oracle providing best possible strategies for replicating the data and keep available by its cluster strategy RAC.

Failover strategies every aspect This is where real architecture story starts when you prepare and build a platform, you should come up with challenging that 'come on break this setup of my platform'. Try all possible failures for every component that is part of the platform.

Disaster Recovery plan

This is usually refered for every big e-commerce running site running basic requirement. It should simulate the production environment. The DR setup is that it will be protect data and business from any unusual calamities incurs. 

Estimation of plan execution The platform designer must have clarity about every aspect of each stage that could takes place in the building platform setup. Predominantly estimation plan for system resources, the number of expertise who can bring the platform build with in the estimated time. This is also depends on the availability of both system resources, man power.

Dedicated User and Group

The WebLogic domain directories would have to be owned by the respective application users. The logs generated by this middleware user must be in such group that could give the accessability to other users who need to access the logs for monitoring.

File System and mounts

This is crutial role while deploying the new environment from the scratch. You need to define separate mount points for 

• • WebLogic domain configurations 

  • WebLogic Server Output logs, Access loggs or application specific logs

  • Application deployment codes and properties

  • Softwares that related to the Projects

The dedicated mount points will avoid unnecessary memory issues such as  Piling up of log files leads to Disk full problems. Frequent archive and cleanup of long stored logs will free up the disk space. Best option is to maintain the automation scripts for this house cleaning process. While making this automation script you need to select best archiving among gzip, tar, cpio etc that should suitable to your operating environment.

The Directory Structure need to build to follow for specific purposes

Installation of Java

This installation is the initial step to start your platform building. Which version of Java (JDK) is suitable for Which WebLogic you can find that in the Oracle provided Certification matrix of each version. Identify what arguments we can pass while installation of Java and what need to  check to confirm that your desired JDK installed. Keeping them into a simple automation script that can be useful when you move for multiple machine installations of JDK. 

Java's DNS Cache for WebLogic

The web applications those are deployed on WebLogic handles multiple user requests. Once an application has performed network access (i.e. urlconnection, parsing of xml document with external references, etc), the DNS settings get cached so any subsequent operation will use the old settings even if the real settings have changed. To reset everything either the application server has to be restarted as the default JVM setting is to cache forever. 

Caching can be disabled by using either networkaddress.cache.ttl  or sun.net.inetaddr.ttl  parameter depending on JVM version Sun JDK 1.5 recommends using “networkaddress.cache.ttl” parameter.  Cache can be disabled by updating the following property in $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/java.security

networkaddress.cache.ttl=0

The default commented and its value set as networkaddress.cache.ttl=-1  in JDK 1.6. Specified in java.security to indicate the caching policy for successful name lookups from the name service. The value is specified as as integer to indicate the number of seconds to cache the successful lookup.

Best References:

Java monitor blog discussed about network parameter settings

The DNS cache for Java application

Installation of WebLogic 11g/12c

The installation of WebLogic 11g we must choose the version and then mode of installation. Usually the initial installation setup could be done using manual and console mode, later for moving to development environment, QA environment we can go-ahaed with Silent mode installations because the number of machines required for that environment are going to increases.It is obvious that we need to choose wise way out as Silent mode installation.

WebLogic Domain Templating

Initially we can do one setup of the complete platform that can be tested all the test cases, that implementation of all the application components, system resources such as JDBC, JMS, deployments of depending libraries then we can go for templatising the domain, that could reduce the tremendous amount of time and work load of infrastructure build team work. The WebLogic domain templating can be done in many ways the following ways:

1. Using pack and unpack scripts

2. Using config_builder.sh requires X11 forwarding for UNIX systems

3. WLST readDomain() and writeTemplate() vice-versa

l GC algorithms

Java Options

Properties file 

Passing the Named values at the time of running the java command.

Initial Tuning parameters

Accept Backlog 

You can tune the number of connection requests that a WebLogic Server instance will accept before refusing additional requests. The Accept Backlog parameter specifies how many Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections can be buffered in a wait queue. This fixed-size queue is populated with requests for connections that the TCP stack has received, but the application has not accepted yet.

Best value sugest as 65 in regular web applications it can be changed as per the needs.

Referance:

set HTTP server logging format

All Managed servers where access logs are enabled should have its format set to Extended instead of common. 

Access logs file should have following format defined in the access log files so that extended logging performs logging based on this format. 

#Version: 1.0

#Fields: c-ip  date time c-dns cs-method sc-status time-taken bytes cs-uri cs(Referer)   

#Software: WebLogic

References:

Oracle  WebServer configurations

File Descriptors on UNIX machines

Oracle Fusion Middleware platform build on WebLogic based, we need to have sufficient file descriptors. We can set to some of the Solaris machines or Linux machines as follows:

fs.file.max=65535

WebLogic WorkManager

By looking at WebLogic 9.2 to 11g environments, Optimally 25-30 JVM threads has yielded a good compromise on CPU, Context Switching and Throughput performance is OK; To find the acqurate thread numbers it must be proven under performance load test. Within WebLogic 11g, there are additional options for optimising workloads, previously thread pools (-Dweblogic.Use81StyleExecuteQueues=true) would have been used to associate thread resources to the execution of transactions within applications. 

Admin Console

The correct process to initiate a configuration change using the Administration console  obtain the lock on the current configuration, make changes and then click the Save button, every thing fine and changed successfully go ahead for updating next changes if all done then click on Activate changes. 

In the console for each managed server and cluster we need to enable Server -->Configuration-->General  Go to the bottom Advance section by lock and tick the checkbox as shown below: