Migration from IBM WebSphere Traditional Server to WebSphere Liberty Server
Hello Folks!! I am here to summarize my experience and my learnings in how we reduced 35–40 mins of deployment time to just a few minutes.
Need of Migration
You must be wondering why a migration was required in the first place. To clarify this thought, I will start with my struggle working on the WAS 8.5.5 application server. I am a backend developer who deals with application servers daily. So in our project, we had a huge monolith legacy application with many features and functionalities. Deploying the application locally and testing the changes was taking around 35–40 minutes. Yes!!! You heard it right, 35–40 minutes just to deploy a single backend component. Then I decided to look for better application servers that are lightweight, robust, and, most importantly, have faster startup times.
Why Liberty?
Let’s understand the advantages of IBM WebSphere liberty as an application server in a nutshell:
- Kernel architecture — A kernel architecture means the runtime starts very small and quickly, then grows as needed. Typically, a Liberty server requires ~50MB of memory and starts in less than 3 seconds, which makes it an Application Server with a faster startup time.
- Feature manager — Application server functionality is implemented as features. Feature manager loads the features as per the requirement. Refer to the below link to get details regarding various features available Liberty features — IBM
- WebSphere Liberty Repository — Features are downloaded as needed directly from IBM.
- Dynamic updates — As soon as any new feature is included in server.xml, the feature manager loads it without actually restarting the server, making it dynamic.
- Simple to install — To install a runtime, just unpack an archive file.
- Simple deployment — Drop in an application/include the application in server.xml, and the server runs it.
- Simple to configure — All the features needed as per the requirement can be added into server.xml, which makes it easy to handle.
Migration Steps
The IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Migration Toolkit provides a rich set of tools that help you migrate applications from third-party application servers between versions of WebSphere Application Server to WebSphere Application Server Liberty.
Installing the migration tool
The migration tools are Eclipse features that you install into an existing Eclipse or Rational integrated development environment (IDE). Eclipse IDE for Enterprise Java Developers is required for working with Java/Jakarta EE applications.
You can install all features of the migration toolkit directly from Eclipse Marketplace. Steps for installation are described in the following steps:
- Access the migration tool software. You can install the tool directly from Eclipse Marketplace.
- Go to Help > Eclipse Marketplace.
- Search for WebSphere migration.
- Under IBM WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit, click Install.
- Expand the IBM WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit, and select the tools you need for version-to-version application server migration. Ensure that Contact all update sites during install to find required software is selected, and click Next.
- In the Install Details window, click Next.
- Read the terms in the Review Licenses window and accept any license agreements. Click Finish. The Installing Software window shows the installation progress.
- When the Software Updates window is displayed, click Yes to restart the IDE.
Configuring the application migration tool for analysis
With an application migration tool installed, you have new analysis options to configure and run an analysis. You can configure the tool to define a set of rules to run and define the scope of analysis within the workspace. The scope can be a project, a working set, or the entire workspace. After you define the scope, you can save the analysis configuration to use or modify it later.
To configure the analysis, complete the following steps:
- Open the analysis configuration options. You can access the configuration options in the following locations within Eclipse:
- In the main Eclipse menu bar, go to Run > Analysis.
- In the Launch toolbar, click the Software Analyzer icon and select Software Analyzer Configurations.
- In the Explorer view, right-click your project and select Software Analyzer > Software Analyzer Configurations. If you do not see Software Analyzer options, see Software Analyzer options not shown.
You can add or remove analysis configurations by using the icons in the window.
- In the configurations list, select Software Analyzer. Then, click New. The right side of the window changes to show the basic configuration interface.
- In the Software Analyzer Configurations window, enter a name for the configuration, such as AppMigration.
- On the Scope tab, select Analyze the entire workspace to scan all projects in the workspace. You can limit the scope of analysis by using the other options to analyze a working set or a selection of projects.
- On the Rules tab, select the type of analysis to perform using the Rule Sets list. You can also select individual rules to run.
- To save the rule configuration, click Apply.
Analyzing code for migration
Run the analysis and display the results. To start the analysis, click Analyze in the Software Analyzer Configuration window. The results are displayed in the Software Analysis Results view.
The content of the results view varies depending on which rules you are running. The results generated by an application migration tool are displayed in one of the following tabs:
- File Review
- Java Code Review
- JSP Code Review
- XML File Review
If no results are shown in the panel, no issues were identified while scanning.
Right-click individual results to show the available options, such as viewing the source code where the problem occurred or correcting the problem with a provided fix.
Based on the review, one can view Result, and the quick fixes are available for individual review sections.
Application Technology Evaluation Report in the Migration Toolkit for Application Source
With any of the migration tools installed, you can generate a report that helps evaluate the Java technologies used by your application. The report gives a high-level review of the programming models found in the application and the WebSphere products that support these programming models.
To generate the report:
- Click Run > Generate Application Technology Evaluation Report.
- Select the projects that you want to evaluate.
- Select the WebSphere products you want to compare.
- Click OK.
The rows in the report vary depending on the application.
Conclusion
After the completion of the migration, the server startup time decreased from 40 minutes to approximately 5 minutes, which is a huge difference. It has saved a huge amount of time from the developers’ perspective and gradually increased the application’s performance.
