WebSphere on Windows or AS400?

[rhunt01]

Ok, not trying to start a broad platform war here...so let me set the stage. We are an AS400 shop on XE and we are staying AS400 for Enterprise, DB, App (UBE processor), logic, etc. However, for our new JDE 9 install we had planned to use OAS...and therefore run it on Windows. Now that all the licensing discussions are complete, the "Blue Stack" will officially be cheaper for us so the only change is that we will be using WebSphere.

I have already provisioned the Windows boxes, built them, etc. They are virtual servers within our beefy virtual environment so the incremental cost is minimal. We are 99% a Windows shop so adminstering Windows, DR, etc. is not an issue.

With all of that being said, my question on where to put WebSphere is primarily one of stability and performance.

I've asked a couple of folks and there seems to be great debate as to whether WebSphere runs better on a particular platform and if running JDE as an all-in-one box will minimize network activity or not (JDBC still making call to a host name was the big question here I think).

Any opinions and real world examples would be great.

Thanks

Ryan

 

[Jeremy M.]

In my personal opinion I have installed WebSphere a dozen times on Windows systems with no issues. The one time I had to install it on an AS/400 I ran into and still have issues with the SM Agent and displaying Runtime Metrics for my JAS instances. It is a known issue with Oracle, however, I am still on an 8.97 Tools Release so it could have been fixed in later TRs.

 

[cdawes]

For this conversation to make any sense we need a lot more details.......

How many users? What modules? How many concurrent users?

What size AS400 (CPW, memory, disk). What O/S are you going to be running? What processor type (Power 5, 5+, 6, 7). What type of disk SCSI or SAS?

How much batch processing do you do? How many high priority UBE vs normal priority UBE's.


I have 75% of my AS400 clients who are live on 8.11, 8.12, 9.0 running WebSphere on the AS400 - either in a separate LPAR or as an All-In-One. In total about 10 clients running WAS on the AS400.


Colin

 

[rhunt01]

Sure thing. Some of these questions I'll have to answer based on my XE (Citrix) environment...hopefully they translate.

-60 concurrent (as in logged in but typically idle) users. Usually no more than 10 sessions actively clicking around at any given moment.
-Modules: GL, AP, AR, Job Cost, Real Estate

AS400:
i5 520
OS/400 V6R1
Power 6+ dual core 4.2Ghz processor running 8300 CPW (both cores active).
16 GB RAM (have the budget to max it out to 32GB if need be)
18 x 141GB 15K RPM SAS drives with 1.5GB battery back read/write cache on RAID controller

Batch processing: Well, my current XE environment has half of the resources you see above (except for disk - we have a rented I/O tower providing DASD to the dev LPAR). We recently bought this AS400. I currently have 2 LPARs, one prod (XE) and one JDE 9 (DEV). When this project is done all resources will go to a single JDE 9 instance. Our current XE environment is using 4300 CPW / 7.5GB RAM and that LPAR barely blinks. All batch processing, reporting (ODBC based), Interactive, etc. is hitting that LPAR and it is blazing fast.

All of our UBE's use the same priority. Some are separated to different job queues but I try to limit it to 2 UBE's running per core.

Thanks. RH

 

[cdawes]

The new box (assuming a single LPAR) can run 7 normal priority UBE's concurrently. You can drop this to 5 or 6 if you want to keep the system running optimally.

With 18 drives you'll have 6 in the CEC and 12 in the tower - totally maxed out but a great config.

I would put WAS on the AS400 in the same LPAR as the database & enterprise server. Since you'll be on V6R1 you'll be using the IBM technology for Java Compiler which is basically the 32 bit Unix JVM running in a UNix O/S on the AS400 (PASE). So overall this should be on par if not better than Intel.

The 4.2 Ghx clock speed is good - not the faster available but the best price performance so this will help Java performance as well.

The only change I would do is bump up the memory. As a rule of thumb I give 8 GB fper core plus 8 GB for the O/S so that takes you to 24 GB so might as well go to 32 GB RAM. This mkes a huge impact on batch performance.

The rest of the tasks are all tuning - do it right and performance will be awesome on this box.

I do have clients with double the numbe rof users on 1/2 the box and performance is still good.


Colin

 

[rhunt01]

Thanks for the response Colin. Quick question. Your statement "So overall this should be on par if not better than Intel." jumps out at me. It gives me the impression that the safe bet is that it would match a Wintel implementation for the WebSphere component. If I've understood that correctly, why are you leaning toward AS400 for where you'd put WAS? In other words, if not performance, is it stability?

Thanks

Ryan

 

[ebearman]

Ryan,

Raw WebSphere performance, non-JDE related just Java VM 32-bit, is about 20% faster on Nehalem chips running Windows Server versus IBM's Power running i/OS. When you factor the total performance window which includes network overhead and the way the i/OS responds to a network/ODBC style request versus a native driver request, the all-in-one version suggested by Colin performs nearly equally if not slightly better than a separate Wintel box.

-Ethan

 

[DRezanka]

We implemented WAS on Windows, although I would have preferred all-in-one. While testing our implementation, there were some performance issues and the cost to increase the AS400 memory was ridiculous. I believe if we had upgraded the memory and hired a new systems administrator we could have tuned the system and had great performance. I do not have the technical skills with the processor and Java performance as the others who have responded, but everything I’ve read suggests all-in-one is a great configuration if it fits your environment. It would also have given us one system startup/boot to deal with rather than having to coordinate the IPL with Windows boxes.

We went with multiple Windows boxes. At first they were monstrous, physical boxes and still cost a whole lot less than the projected AS400 memory upgrade. We have since virtualized them and have seen no performance degradation (I believe the processors in the VM host were pretty new). The Windows solution gave us more scalability for the cost. We were able to buy a much bigger machine than we needed and scaled down the size to what was reasonable. Also, we used our corporations existing load balancing hardware rather than having to configure WAS ND. This made the WAS implementation a little simpler, since we do not have WAS implementers on staff.