Rationale

Java EE clusters are more and more frequently deployed within Enterprise Information Systems, to cope with the growing requirements in term of scalability and availability. Besides, SOA solutions get widely deployed to host enterprise applications. In many cases the sudden expansion of such systems has led to very complex structures which, using conventional methods, can only be monitored and controlled with difficulty. These distributed architectures raise new administration issues, since they cannot be handled reasonably by hand to satisfy the required QoS:
- the N-tiers model, Java EE and the JVM, the distributed aspects of a cluster, the different services of a SOA architecture increase the number of software pieces to administrate and the number of events to monitor in the global system.
- the configuration and tuning capabilities provided by the middleware components, together with the complexity of the Java EE and SOA specifications, do require the setting of a huge number of parameters.
JASMINe
The OW2 JASMINe project aims to develop an administration tool dedicated to Java EE (Apache, JOnAS, EasyBeans, ...), MOM (JORAM, ...) or SOA distributed applications (Orchestra, Bonita, Petals, ...) in order to facilitate the job of the system administrator. It relies on advanced management features and on autonomous behaviour capabilities to reduce the management costs of such architectures.
Main features

- JASMINe Design (cf. details) provides the user with a GUI tool for defining a cluster configuration.
- JASMINe Deploy (cf. details) enables the deployment of the middleware binaries and configuration across the cluster
- JASMINe Monitoring (cf. details) is used for tracking performance (displaying charts) and for detecting errors through a rules mechanism
- JASMINe Self-management (cf. details) offers a mechanism for implementing some self-repair or self healing behaviors.
Benefits
- Help the administrator during the cluster design phase
- Easily deploy the designed architecture onto the physical machines
- Reduce the risk of human error in configuration and management operations
- Improve the response time to eliminate malfunctions occurring in the system
- Improve the global availability of applications (by minimizing service interruption periods)
- Optimize global performance


