WebSphere or Weblogic for TR 9.1

[neil_shepherd]

Hi All,

We’re currently looking to upgrade our TR from 8.98.3.1 to 9.1. It looks like our current web server (WebSphere 6.1) is no longer supported so I’m interested in getting thoughts on upgrading to WebSphere 7.0 or moving to Weblogic.

I work in a small team of 2 developers where we also carry out the CNC activities (bringing in experts where necessary, though finding UK based WebSphere experts with knowledge of JDE has proved difficult). We’ve built up a limited amount of experience with WebSphere over the last 18 months and have some limited access to an internal WebSphere expert. We’ve found the product stable but complex when trouble-shooting issues and have some concern that Oracle will look to push WAS issues to IBM leaving us caught between 2 vendors in the future.

My normal inclination would be to build on the knowledge we currently have and stick with WebSphere but gut feeling says Red Stack is likely to be a better long term bet especially as our organisation has a large investment with Oracle products (though not directly Weblogic) and relatively little with IBM.

I’d be interested in others thoughts of the 2 products or if it boils down to personal preference as much as anything.

Regards

Neil.

 

[jdel6654]

I'll let others weigh in, but I'll give my 2 cents.

I am working on 2 projects right now: E1 9.0 upgrade that includes a new TR 9.1 installation and, secondly, a Fusion 11G ECM implementation.

We decided early on to upgrade from WS 6.1 and go to WS 7.0 because of licensing purposes and staying with iSeries hardware. Other than Oracle refusing to provide the WS 7.0 plugin install files, WS 7.0 has been easy to upgrade with. Its relatively slow (IMHO) on iSeries but has been very reliable with TR 9.1.x.

The second project is a Fusion 11G project with WLS 10.x as the web app server. Just setting apart the Fusion ECM and related apps, the WLS implementation has not gone well. I have no idea how others are running WLS 10.x / Fusion 11G with E1. I have never been more frustrated in my life with Oracle support. I have spent closed to 4 months (off and on) trying to get the Windows services for the Admin Server and ECM servers running. The fantastic support I grew to appreciate with the previous versions of WLS (6.x, 7.x, 8.x) seems to have been vaporized. The people supporting WLS don't seem to care one way or the other whether the product runs on Windows server. I am assuming that if I was Solaris it would be a different story.

 

[mmateus]

Hi there,

My two cents contribution

We have been live with two of our environments on E9.1.0.1 running on an IBM i V6R1 for the past 3 months. We were running on a test environment for the past year (8.98.4 before we upgraded to 9.1.0.1). We initially had problems with the WAS 7.0 performance on the IBM i compared to it running on Windows. We are using WAS Express 7.0 on V6R1 and it so far has given us no headaches plus there are no licensing costs for Express. We wanted everyting to run on the IBM i. We eventually found that in the call stack, during start-up or processing, that websphere was trying to do a lookup host on the IPV4 and IPV6 networks on the IBM i causing it to be slow. WAS was taking about 10 minutes to start up but after we forced it to only use IPV4, we took about 30 seconds to start up.

We also followed some guidelines on the IBM Websphere Infocenter as well as Oracle Knowledge Garden to tune Websphere.

Many thanks.

Kind regards,
Misael

OneWorld Xe on IBM i V5R4 with SP23_R1
JDE EnterpriseOne 9.0 on IBM i V6R1 with TR 9.1.0.1 running WAS 7.0