8.11 - Websphere on iSeries or Separate Box

Hi,

We are in the begining planning stages of upgrading from 8.0 to 8.11. We run on an iSeries. We are hearing different opinions about where to run Websphere. Do any of you out there have any suggestions as to whether we should run Websphere on our iSeries or on a seprate platform?

Thanks in advance for any comments!!

I've asked around about this recently myself and the general advice that I've been getting has been to run Websphere on several other boxes depending on the load you'll have. Websphere is apparently a bit of a resource hog, so it's best to keep it off the iSeries. But that's just what I'm hearing. I haven't done anything yet.

Hi

Are you talking about just WebSphere or entire JAS solution?

I try to remain agnostic about platform preferences with regard to customers but personally, I would run JAS solution on Windows Intel box.

And I don't like making Bill G and friends richer. Maybe I am just brainwashed. On the AS400 systems I have tried to run WebSphere on (720 sytem V5R2 I believe) the JAS solution and WebSphere was dog slow with comparable amount of memory and processor to a Windows machine.

It also depends I think on a customer's in house skill set and personal preference as well.

My two cents.

Joe Tirado
Senior CNC Consultant

Great, this sounds like the beginning of another holy war.

The straight answer is well it depends. Can you post the config of the iSeries (CPW, LPAR's, etc.). Are you upgrading the box for 811? Have you done an Official sizing?

WAS runs fine on both. Even if I install WAS on Intel I configure it on iSeries as a 'backup'.

Colin

Thanks Guys,

Here's my config right now (running JDE 8.0):
i570, 2.5 procs - 8900 CPW, 1 LPAR, 11 gb memory.

I went thru IBMs official sizing exercise for the 8.11 upgrade and it came back with rediculous numbers.....
They want us to go to 6 processors - 18000 CPW
60 gb memory!!!
and almost 2 tb disk space.

I personally think this is a marketing ploy because that machine would run 20 companies. We only have 100 users for gosh sakes.

Anyway, does this help? I'm hearing people say Websphere is slow on iSeries.

Ha cdawes...I am long out of the business of trying to convince someone to do something they don't want to do-

No holy wars here.

--I mentioned a PERSONAL preference and experience with WebSphere on AS400.

Of course, if money is no object and the platform is what you want/like, go with it.

Joe Tirado

gesbos1,

Do you work at my company? We're having the exact same kind of experience. We just upgraded our server last year and we've been very happy with our performance. Now going to 8.11 they say we need to do another huge upgrade. We're already on board for more disk, but why more processors? It's the same product and only WAS is new. That's when I started digging around some and got the feedback about WAS on AS400 being a pig. So I think we'll be going with 1-3 NT servers for WAS.

But like I said, it's all written in pencil for now.

GoNugs

So I guess you're inside 1 LPAR so that's how you get 8900 CPW or 2.5 CPU's? (Otherwise you'd be at 6600 CPW, 9600 CPW or 12600 CPW?

With only 100 users, ecen if they are concurrent all running Distribution and Manufacturing you have more than enough CPW to run WAS on iSeries. Gee I'm love to be your IBM sales rep.

I think you'd be more than fine with WAS on iSeries, however you need to do some setup/config (seperate memory pools, etc.).

WAS on Intel is just as easy as WAS on iSeries. One thing that you need to keep in mind is that since you're already in this monster 570 users will see a DECREASE in performance with 811 especially if you convert to Unicode in phase 2 rather than for go-live. 811 uses 50% horse power than 8.0 so it might be best to put WAS on Intel to TRY and keep performance close to what it used to be which right now should be spectacular.

Colin

Hey Colin,

Yes, we have our PD environment on 1 LPAR with 2.5 POWER5 processors. PY/DV are on a different LPAR.

So, you're saying even if we offload WAS onto a separate box, users are still going to see a performance degredation going from 8.0 to 8.11??? Wonder why that is? Just because WAS and java are slow compared to C? Wow, our users aren't going to like this.

I would love to hear other peoples comments who have already implemented 8.11 with an iSeries environment.

I'm just worried that throwing Intel into the mix is just another management nightmare on a platform that is less reliable than iSeries...

Ok now you've done it. You just opened up a whole box of possibilities.

How about another LPAR just for WAS? Why not a Linux LPAR on i5 and run WAS there? We could run the WAS for PD811 in the 'other' partition.

If you want to run WAS on i5 which it sounds like you prefer then you'll need to add a CPU to MAINTAIN the stellar performance that you have. If you think good performance is acceptable (rather than stellar)then you can continue with your existing box.

Yes performance will go down on 811. When has anyone installed a newer smaller faster version of sotware? It always gets bigger and slower, this is the way of the world.

See the attached for sizing considerations from Xe/8.0 to 8.9/8.10/8.11. These assume Unicode conversion so add another decrease of a few percent.

Colin

Lucy....you got some splaining to do

CPU Resource Differences
Upgrade Factor
EnterpriseOne Workload iSeries pSeries xSeries
Database 1.41 2.33 2.80
Application 1.28 1.18 1.42
Batch 1.34 1.62 1.79
HTML 1.79 2.25 1.91
Virtual 3-tier 1.34 1.62 1.79
Three-in-one 1.48 1.76 1.82

Thanks for the attachment. Can you explain it? Are we supposed to add all those upgrade factors together to get a total upgrade factor? For instance, database requires 1.41 more processor in 8.11 than 8.0, and batch adds 1.28, etc. Then, at the bottom, there's the 3-tier and all-in-one upgrade factor. I don't understand how all these factors interact.

I'm not for or against any platform really....I just want to run each process wherever it makes sense, that is wherever it is reliable, cost effective, and best performance. Is that too much to ask

Wow -- Absolutely love the conversation going on here - since we are thinking 8.11 in the near future and shortly moving to a new i-series.

We are on 820 i-series( 1100 CPW single proc 6 GB memory) running OW Xe and will shortly move to a 520 i-series ( 3300 CPW single Proc, 8GB memory and 20x35GB box).
What would be your thoughts on moving to 8.11 and having i-series as WAS.
Right now our is debate is going to 8.10 from XE or to 8.11 and what about WAS?


OW XE update 7 coexistent on AS400 with Citrix clients W2K TS and NT Deployment server.

What is your corporate IT strategy?

One Big Box?
Distributed Solution?
Best of Breed or All-in-One?

Answer questions like these and you will have the guidance you seek.

The point is that one should architect a solution that aligns with your IT strategies and make it the performance, etc. work. Doing so will create efficiencies that will outweigh any other benefits.



[ QUOTE ]
Hi,

We are in the begining planning stages of upgrading from 8.0 to 8.11. We run on an iSeries. We are hearing different opinions about where to run Websphere. Do any of you out there have any suggestions as to whether we should run Websphere on our iSeries or on a seprate platform?

Thanks in advance for any comments!!

[/ QUOTE ]

cdawes, you asked: Why not a Linux LPAR on i5 and run WAS there? It doesn't work, we tried it, as the JAS app only runs and is supprted on Linux x86, not Linux PPC. So does the WebSphere version Oracle ships with TechFoundation.
You can possibly find a WAS 5.02 for Linux Power (released by IBM directly at that fixpack level, similar to the W2k3 version) if you bought your WebSphere from IBM. But that won't do you much good as the 8.94/8.95 JAS installer for Linux will be compiled for x86, not PowerPC.

[ QUOTE ]

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
CPU Resource Differences - Upgrade Factor
EnterpriseOne| iSeries| pSeries| xSeries
Workload
Database| 1.41| 2.33| 2.8|
Application| 1.28| 1.18| 1.42|
Batch| 1.34| 1.62| 1.79|
HTML| 1.79| 2.25| 1.91|
Virtual 3-tier| 1.34| 1.62| 1.79|
Three-in-one| 1.48| 1.76| 1.82|
</pre><hr />

[/ QUOTE ]

Where did you get this graph from ? I'm a little blown away by it - and would love to understand the graph a little better - wow - did Oracle actually do some benchmarks on 8.11 ?!?! This is the very first comparison between AS/400, Unix and Intel I've ever seen.

Lets look into these a little more deeply.

According to the CPU resource differences, running the 8.11 database on an iSeries is substantially more efficient than on Unix or Intel - I assume the comparison is versus DB2 across all platforms to be fair. On Intel, UDB is twice a hog as it is on the iSeries.

The OneWorld Appserver code, however, seems to run more efficiently under Unix than it does under AS/400 - which I can understand, since much of the Appserver code has always been initially tested on HP-UX prior to compatibility testing on other platforms. I don't understand why Batch should be dramatically more efficient however, since the code is identical. This doesn't make sense.

HTML shows that Websphere and the Java code runs more efficiently on the iSeries - substantially quicker than on the Unix platform (again, I've seen this on the Proprietary unix platforms) - but I'm surprised that its more efficient than Intel. My guess is the "tweaks" that IBM put in the code have helped it along with 8.11.

Virtual 3-Tier, in my opinion, means that the application server and the database runs on the enterprise server, and the JAS server runs seperately. For some reason, these figures are identical to Batch running alone - so I might be wrong in assuming what "virtual 3-tier" is.

Lastly, we have "everything in one" - ie the database, application code AND the JAS Server running together. According to IBM, the iSeries trumps the other platforms.

Of course, we don't have the baseline for our examples. Obviously, the numbers mean that the database load between Xe and 8.11 requires 2.8 times the CPU load on an intel server comparitively. With intel servers performing substantially faster than when Xe was released, I'm not sure this a big issue - but are iSeries platforms running 4-5 times faster between 2000 and today ?