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Category Archives: Hyperic

Why Lean Application Servers Are Faster, Cheaper, and Better For Business

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The application server has been the centerpiece of modern architectures for web-based applications for over a decade. However, there are trends in technology that make us rethink how we use application servers and how we can get the most value out of them.

Over the years enterprises have built up considerable technical debt. This debt is made up of outdated processes, legacy applications, and stale technologies. We are all familiar with the types of headaches caused by older apps:

  1. Development is slow.
  2. Costs continue to rise, not fall.
  3. Business needs are increasing in speed and complexity.

The good news are there are solutions today that solve all of these challenges. This post and accompanying video are aimed straight at helping you understand what will help you evolve your applications to a modern approach that will benefit your company and your customers alike. Using VMware and open source technologies such as Spring, Apache Tomcat, vSphere, Spring Insight and Hyperic we will explain to you how these tools and methodologies come together with tc Server to evolve your development organization and applications to tap into the full potential of lean development and cloud computing.

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VMware vFabric tc Server to Continue Support of Java 6

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Oracle has announced the formal end of life (EOL) of Java 6 coming up in February of 2013. Given that a significant portion of VMware vFabric Suite customers are still running applications that use Java 6, VMware has chosen to continue  support for vFabric Suite running Java 6 applications.  This includes a la carte support only contracts for Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTPD. Current versions will not expire their support for Java 6 with the EOL in February, 2013.

Additionally, VMware will continue testing and validating future versions of the vFabric Suite on Java 6 until further notice.

What this means for customers

vFabric customers that chose not to update their applications to Java 7 will still enjoy the same level of support from VMware for their vFabric middleware stack that powers their Java 6 applications, even past its end of life. It also means that Java 6 will continue to be a testing requirement for future versions of vFabric Suite. Customers not interested in updating their applications to Java 7, can continue to trust their vFabric upgrades from VMware.

For customers purchasing a la carte VMware support only for Apache Tomcat or combined support only for Apache Tomcat and HTTPD, they will not violate their support contract by continuing to run applications using Java 6.

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The Best VMware vFabric Stories of 2012 & What’s In Store for 2013

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As this year comes to a close, it’s time to be reflective of what happened in the past and start planning for a new year. The vFabric team has had some major achievements this year, introducing several new products to the market including the innovative vFabric Application Director, the widely anticipated Project Serengeti to enable rapid cloud deployments for Hadoop, and a new tool to the vFabric Suite users called vFabric Administration Server (VAS).  We announced a new VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace to help further accelerate application development with a professionally moderated library of enterprise grade, ready-to-use application components that can be run on any cloud.

Next year is going to be even bigger with the Pivotal Initiative where several of the products covered on this blog will be following the new venture. This is still in the planning stages, so we will be expecting to share with you the plans for our products alongside the formal communications from each of the companies involved. (Sorry — no extra information is available right now)

One thing that we are going to be doing in early 2013 is to move the conversation of how you manage applications to be with the conversations of how you manage virtual infrastructure. To that end, we will be moving all topics of Application Performance Manager, AppInsight, Application Director, Hyperic, and Spring Insight to the VMware Management Blog as of January 1st. To make sure you keep up with the management topics, please be sure to follow us @vmwareappmgmt and @vmwaremgmt.

In the meantime, we’d like to reshare with you the top 20 stories we had for 2012, and invite you to comment here on what stories you would like to see us cover on either blog for 2013.

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New Pay for Dev Bounty Program for Hyperic & Cloud Applications Marketplace

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With the launch of the VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace just two weeks ago, VMware is adding some extra incentives for developers to join our program. Several bounties ranging in reward values from $500 to $1500 are available for both Spring Insight and Hyperic.

Earlier this summer, VMware announced a bounty program for Spring Insight. Today, a similar Bounty Program for Hyperic is also available. The Spring Insight Bounty program has had 2 plugins currently committed, with one in the final acceptance quality assurance stage.

The Bounty Program is designed to complement the VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace, where completed and approved solutions are listed and ready-to-use. The Bounty Program, on the other hand, is a place where companies, including VMware itself, can request and reward community members for creating any original work, including plug-ins, patches, tools, specifications, documentation, or sample code. Customers and Open Source users of both Hyperic and Spring Insight are encouraged to list their own plugins in the forum. To list a bounty, you only need to be a member of the forums, which is free. Continue reading →

How to Prepare for a Hyperic 5.0 Upgrade

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Recently, we announced a new version of our popular web infrastructure management tool, Hyperic 5.0.  We also explained how, in this new version, the backend data store is moving to support PostgreSQL. In this article, we are providing existing Hyperic users the information they need to plan their upgrade to Hyperic 5.0. This article is for anyone already running Hyperic HQ (open source), vFabric Hyperic, vFabric Application Performance Manager, or vCenter Operations Manager.

This post is meant to augment the knowledge base article, KB 2033940, published back in August.

Planning the Upgrade

We know platform changes can make an upgrade more difficult and certainly raise eyebrows. So, we’ve taken measures to help make the migration as seamless and simple as possible. So far, the cases we’ve seen take about an hour. As with any data migration, the greater the volume of database records, the longer it can take. Continue reading →

A Tale of Modernization: Stopping Bank Robbers as a Service (20 Billion Times to Date)

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Pirates. Pick pockets. Bank Robbers.

What do these have to do with applications modernization?

Well, bank robbers have turned digital, and this article is about modernizing one of the most successful systems used to stop them.

Stealing credit card numbers, emptying online bank accounts and stealing identities is now big business for thieves and consequently a big area for software companies and banks to collaborate and stop them. Cybercrime and malware have become such an issue that, according to Gartner, the web fraud detection market (where RSA competes) grew 35% in 2010 and 25% in 2011.

RSA is in the business of stopping banks and their customers from being robbed (among other things). Their technology has protected people, businesses, and financial institutions from online fraud for almost 20 years. Their Adaptive Authentication solution is deployed at over 8000 companies, used by over 200 million people, and has protected over 20 billion transactions to date. To jump on the “everything as a service” bandwagon, Adaptive Authentication is literally embarking on a project to “Stop Bank Robbers as a Service.”

We had the opportunity to catch up with the RSA engineering team that is developing this next-generation service using a wide range of VMware capabilities, including VMware vCloud Suite and vFabric. We learned that VMware virtualization infrastructure management, application performance management, automated provisioning, and application servers are already providing benefits along with improved runtimes, and got a peek into how they plan to do the financial side of IT business management using VMware tools.

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VMware Releases 3 Major Advances Toward the Software-Defined Datacenter

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VMware customers are realizing the potential for the Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC), where infrastructure is delivered as a service through automated data center management. At VMworld Europe earlier this year, we announced that vFabric Application Director was becoming part of the vCloud Suite, VMware’s comprehensive cloud infrastructure solution that integrates VMware’s leading virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into a single SKU, placing it easily within reach of virtualization infrastructure architects to deliver private cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Today, VMware announces three major releases that further advance customers toward making the SDDC a reality.

  1. A new version of VMware vFabric Application Director 5.0 is available, including as part of the updated VMware vCloud Suite 5.1. The release features new and enhanced capabilities for simplifying and automating provisioning of applications to the cloud and the setup of PaaS environments. For more information on the vCloud Suite release, see the press release.
  2. VMware has released an open marketplace, called the VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace, where partners, developers and VMware can easily publish and download many of the pre-built components application teams need to build their apps.
  3. A new Application Management 5.0 Suite, which combines new releases of vFabric Application Director and vFabric Application Performance Manager together to allow IT to provide self-service provisioning and integrated application management to application owners and developers building scalable applications in the cloud. Continue reading →

New Hyperic 5.0 Release Further Embeds Web Infrastructure Monitoring in VMware’s vFabric

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Hyperic 5.0It’s been 4 years and one week since we’ve changed the first number in the application version number for vFabric Hyperic and the open source version, Hyperic HQ.  In that time, a lot has happened, including being acquired by VMware. This latest release, marks the culmination of 4 years of integrating Hyperic into VMware’s processes and product lines, and establishes it as a fully integrated part of VMware’s vFabric cloud application platform.

>> Download vFabric Hyperic 5.0

Release Highlights:

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Why Hyperic is Going to Support PostgreSQL Only As a Backend Database

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The next release of Hyperic is coming up soon and the biggest change is to the backend. In the next release, we will only support one database, namely PostgreSQL. Those of you who have been with Hyperic for a while as long as I have may be surprised considering our history with PostgreSQL, but, as you read though this blog, it will start to make sense.

History of PostgreSQL and Hyperic

For the last few years Hyperic has supported only two databases for production use at scale—Oracle and MySQL. This in itself was a big change since at one point, PostgreSQL was our bread and butter.  Hyperic was originally designed on PostgreSQL 7.x. As an open source project, PostgreSQL has a very easy license for distribution. As a startup company we had to get our product out into the marketplace quickly and affordably, so therefore PostgreSQL made sense.

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Rearview Mirror: The Evolution of Hyperic Over the Past 6 Years

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An early design for mousepad giveaways from 2007 that I still use as my mousepad today.

Today is a new kind of birthday for me—it’s the day I started at Hyperic 6 years ago. It’s a journey that has been nothing short of surprising. My first meeting with then CEO Javier Soltero started the pace of what was to come: I had no idea it was an interview walking in, and was even more surprised when I walked out of that same interview accepting a job that same night. That sets the tone for the next 6 years.

It’s been an exciting journey riding the waves of technology changes these past 6 years, and sitting, in my opinion, in the perfect spot to see some of the biggest disruptors unfold.  I have literally had the privilege to work with the most interesting companies in technology along the way. Most of the biggest companies on the web, many of the biggest companies on the stock market, and some incredibly innovative startups have used our software, partnered with us, and in two cases—acquired us. From this vantage point, I have seen some impressive changes in our industry along the way. Here are some of the highlights:
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