An Oracle White Paper January 2012 Introducing WebLogic Server 12c The #1 Application Server across Conventional and Cloud Environments
Executive Overview... 2 Choice of Deployment Models... 3 The Flexibility of Cloud Deployments... 3 Oracle Cloud Application Foundation... 4 Significant Performance Improvements... 5 Improve Service Levels with the World s Fastest App Server... 5 Enhance Cluster Performance with Active GridLink for RAC... 6 Speed Up Multi Node Configurations with Oracle Traffic Director.. 7 Accelerate Business Continuity with New DR Architecture... 8 Increase Scalability with Oracle Coherence... 8 Speed Up Messaging with JMS Improvements... 9 Simplified Deployment and Management... 10 Improve Administration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c... 10 Streamline Cloud Provisioning with Virtual Assembly Builder... 11 Simplify Upgrades with Comprehensive Tools and Utilities... 11 Modern and Efficient Development Environment... 12 Boost Productivity with Enhanced Support for Java EE 6... 13 Support for Mobile Development Framework... 13 Third Party Validation... 14 Conclusion... 15
Executive Overview Today s business leaders make challenging demands on information technology (IT) professionals. Do more with less and fast, is one frequent refrain. And when you ve done more with less, figure out how to do even more with still less on your next set of projects and deliver even faster. Many organizations are struggling to meet these imperatives. Why? Competitive markets, business models, and consumer preferences change quickly, and keeping up requires making changes to existing software or writing entirely new applications. Having a powerful and flexible application server platform can help business leaders meet these challenges. These software environments provide a development and execution platform for both internal applications, typically supporting internal business functions, and external facing applications, which can be business critical, customer facing, supporting partners, and more. Application servers provide runtime capabilities like reliability, availability, scalability, security, user management, performance, virtualization and more. In addition, application servers also provide tools for developing, testing, and deploying applications. Oracle WebLogic Server is the number one application server, with a 43 percent share of the application server market. 1 With Oracle WebLogic Server 12c, Oracle has created a versatile middleware foundation on which to run applications on conventional infrastructure, cloudcomputing infrastructure, and engineered systems. Oracle s product roadmap meets customers where they are today and offers capabilities that satisfy their future plans. If running their applications in a conventional environment, these customers will benefit from the many enhancements to Oracle s flagship application server platform, such as improved service levels, better load balancing, simplified clustering, and enhanced business continuity. They may also be interested in evolving their data center to Engineered Systems with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or a cloud based environment, public or private. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c has been optimized for all these types of environments. 1 Gartner 2010 Worldwide Application Server Market Share report, (March 2011). 2
W e chose Oracle W eblogic Server specifically because it is the industry standard, delivers the highest levels of availability and is the highest performing application server on the market. It doesn t take a lot of hardware... which attests to how well Oracle WebLogic Server performs. W e are able to do more than four million page views per day on just four servers. VP of applications development and architecture, Major Hotel Chain Choice of Deployment Models With Oracle WebLogic you can build an application server infrastructure using standard Java Standard Edition (SE) and Java Enterprise Edition (EE) tools. You can deploy and run packaged and homegrown applications on this best of breed, comprehensive platform. You can also deploy these applications literally unchanged to Oracle s high performance Engineered System (Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud) and experience performance and scalability gains that are orders of magnitude higher than conventional platforms. Customers building a private cloud environment typically run Oracle s middleware infrastructure on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. You can also leverage Oracle s public cloud offering, Oracle Java Cloud Service, which leverages Oracle WebLogic Server. Since Oracle s public cloud is open and standards based, applications built and run on this public cloud offering can be transparently deployed on premise as well. Oracle offers complete deployment flexibility. Oracle offers complete deployment flexibility: Deploy on conventional infrastructure, run applications as is on Engineered Systems, or move them to the cloud. The Flexibility of Cloud Deployments Many organizations are actively evaluating, developing and transforming their middleware infrastructure to adopt private and public cloud infrastructure. There is a clear shift in enterprises to reduce complexity and create standardized technology platforms for running custom and packaged applications. Customers are also looking for practical ways to protect their existing investments while moving to the cloud. The goals of such cloud efforts commonly include the following: Avoiding lengthy procurement, configuration and deployment of hardware and software assets Provisioning capacity incrementally without large capital outlays 3
Guaranteeing service levels to ensure performance, reliability, and availability of information systems Rapid time to market for high value business applications Oracle s vision for the cloud is founded on flexibility, openness, and portability. What you build with a standard based infrastructure works in the cloud, both public and private. This differs from many other cloud vendors, which utilize a proprietary infrastructure and non standard capabilities. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c, combined with Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit, and virtualization capabilities, provides a powerful software platform for cloud computing. Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and the Oracle Public Cloud both depend on WebLogic Server to deliver Java EE application server infrastructure for public and private cloud deployments. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c powers the cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Foundation To meet the business and technical needs of customers adopting cloud computing architecture, Oracle developed the Cloud Application Foundation (CAF) platform. Oracle s Cloud Application Foundation offers: Best of Breed Technologies Products that make up Cloud Application Foundation, including WebLogic Server and Coherence, are leaders in their categories, reflected by #1 market share. Optimized for Engineered Systems This platform is optimized to run on the world s first and only engineered system for cloud computing, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, tested and is tuned by Oracle to provide the best foundation for Java applications, Oracle applications and other enterprise applications to run with blazing performance. Choice of Private or Public Cloud Oracle lets customers choose and even toggle between Private and Public Cloud so they have complete flexibility and can leverage existing investments. 4
Open Standards Platform The platform technologies are built with open standards. Oracle is driving innovation in Java, the most prominent platform for enterprise applications, with more than nine million developers worldwide. Customers can run their WebLogic applications on any open standards based platform. Customers can buy best of breed products and integrate them manually to create a cloud foundation, but the ensuing infrastructure will be difficult to assemble, upgrade, and maintain. The Oracle Cloud Application Foundation, by contrast, offers best of breed technologies in an open, Java based architecture that includes the world s best application server along with tools and utilities for assembling virtual applications and deploying them in a high performance, highavailability, easy to manage environment. The Cloud Application Foundation makes it easier to build, run, and manage Java services and applications in the Cloud. Significant Performance Improvements Oracle continues to invest heavily in performance improvements throughout the Oracle Fusion Middleware family. But it s not just performance for the sake of speed; better performance translates to lower cost and higher utilization for customers. Improve Service Levels with the World s Fastest App Server Independent benchmarks routinely identify Oracle WebLogic Server as the world s fastest application server. For example, the SPECjEnterprise 2010 performance tests found WebLogic Server to be the clear leader in multiple categories, as shown in the figure below: 5
Oracle WebLogic Server performs better than IBM WebSphere Application Server in multiple categories (source: http://www.spec.org/jappserver2010/results/). These performance stats motivated a major hotel chain to use Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle JRockit to power all aspects of its front desk operations, including monitoring room inventory, rates, and reservations. The application processes 4.5 million daily web requests across 4,500 properties, and has the capacity to scale across the entire portfolio of 6000+ hotels. When booking reservations and checking people in at the front desk, application performance and availability is of paramount importance. Oracle WebLogic Server provides the high performance and availability to meet these requirements. Enhance Cluster Performance with Active GridLink for RAC Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) are designed to work together to support highly available and scalable applications. To simplify Oracle RAC installations, WebLogic Server can utilize a single GridLink data source to connect to an entire RAC cluster. With Active GridLink for RAC, WebLogic instances are isolated from RAC configuration changes, and DBAs only need to contend with a single data source rather than multiple data sources. 6
All of our core systems run on Oracle WebLogic, including CRM, billing, revenue management system, and our operational support systems. W e're able to take all of our custom Java applications, deploy them on Oracle W eblogic Suite, and obtain bulletproof reliability and scalability. Chief Architect, Mobile Communications and Dispatching Company Active GridLink for RAC distributes work based on different backend node capacities, automatically detecting and adapting to overworked nodes and hangs. It enables smart load balancing across RAC nodes. This makes it easier to route traffic around node failures, enhancing availability and performance. There are configuration and management advantages as well since WebLogic instances are isolated from RAC configuration changes, and DBAs only need to contend with a single data source rather than multiple data sources. This also isolates the middleware operations team from any changes to the Oracle RAC configuration. For example, a leading health insurance firm in the UK uses Oracle WebLogic Suite with Oracle RAC to support 800 agents in four call centers. In order to handle approximately 2,700 Enterprise Java Bean calls and 1,100 page requests per minute, the company relies on Active GridLink for RAC to manage instance shutdown and structure rolling software upgrades, helping the company to maintain strict service level agreements. Speed Up Multi Node Configurations with Oracle Traffic Director IT departments must continually scale their infrastructure to accommodate increased traffic to enterprise applications. Many organizations employ load balancing technology to distribute their application workloads across multiple physical and virtual servers. Load balancing helps to improve resource utilization, maximize throughput, and minimize response time. Optimized for use with WebLogic Server 12c, Oracle Traffic Director is an advanced load balancing solution optimized for high performance traffic management. It offers up to 3.5 times more throughput with 28 percent lower CPU utilization than Apache. WebLogic Server 12 customers enjoy up to 3.5x higher throughput performance with Oracle Traffic Director. 7
All of our revenue comes from our W eb site. In order to meet our business goals, we need to make sure consumers stay engaged. W eblogic Suite is critical to delivering pages as quickly as possible. We also use JRockit, which is the fastest virtual machine around. It s incredible technology. IT Executive, Automotive E Commerce Site Accelerate Business Continuity with New DR Architecture Disaster recovery (DR) procedures ensure rapid recovery or continuation of a technology infrastructure after a natural or human induced disaster. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced disaster recovery and business continuity. Organizations can store transaction logs in an Oracle database instead of a file system, providing a highly available storage mechanism to improve the speed and reliability of disaster recovery operations. This permits them to utilize Oracle Active Data Guard or Oracle GoldenGate replication technology to move DR state information across data centers. Oracle s enhanced DR architecture enables more effective recovery scenarios. Oracle WebLogic Active GridLink for RAC simplifies configuration of clustered DR configurations. Support for Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata engineered systems ensures tremendous scalability for IT operations of any size. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c places transaction logs on the database tier to improve the speed, reliability and availability of disaster recovery operations. Increase Scalability with Oracle Coherence Oracle Coherence is the industry s leading in memory data grid solution for distributed applications and application servers. With support for Java,.NET, C++ and REST clients, Coherence provides data caching, data replication, and distributed computing services to improve scalability, availability, reliability, and performance. It relieves overloaded data sources, simplifying management and improving performance for queries, transactions and events. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c enables developers to scale a Coherence Data Grid as an independent architectural tier, accommodating a growing workload by offloading state information and queries. 8
Oracle W eblogic Server and Oracle SOA Suite are strategic to our company. They integrate multiple systems and automate business processes to set up call flows, set up agents, and make sure that a month of work can be done in minutes. Director of Client Solutions, Global Business Process Outsourcing Company A new Elastic Data feature makes it possible to gain near memory speed access to data regardless of the storage medium enabling Coherence to handle four times as much data as before. Customers can also use the Coherence*Web module to achieve linear scalability for HTTP Session Management in clusters of hundreds of production servers based on Oracle Coherence s dynamic partitioning capability. Another option is to use ActiveCache to provide replicated and distributed caching services that make an application s data available to all servers in a Coherence data cluster. A major Asian shipping company implemented Oracle Coherence to process 1.4 million price adjustments and order status updates per day. In order to improve the company s pricing structure and lower costs, it needed to scale its infrastructure to support much larger peak volumes. With Coherence, the company has been able to reduce data latency from several hours to less than five minutes, enabling it to better monitor shipments and enhance customer service. Today the company s Coherence architecture is configured to handle over three times the peak production volume, giving the shipping line plenty of headway for the future. Speed Up Messaging with JMS Improvements WebLogic JMS is an enterprise class messaging system that is tightly integrated into the WebLogic Server platform. Oracle fully supports the JMS specification and also provides numerous WebLogic JMS extensions that go above and beyond the standard JMS APIs. WebLogic Server 12c has been designed to improve JMS performance on conventional hardware, leading to 3x higher throughput. When used with Oracle Exalogic, WebLogic JMS provides additional performance benefits based on Elastic Messaging Overflow, Request Manager, and Exabus, which provides high speed message virtualization. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c improves JMS performance on conventional hardware while improving resiliency with even greater performance on Engineered Systems. This diagram shows how threadpooling on Exalogic improves JMS performance. 9
Simplified Deployment and Management WebLogic Server 12c simplifies application server deployments while automating monitoring and maintenance activities. It provides the foundation for building and deploying a modern infrastructure with a reduced hardware footprint that can be expanded and contracted easily. Virtualization is at the heart of these architectures both convention and cloud based and WebLogic Server 12c accelerates middleware deployments with its open, standards based virtualization services. Improve Administration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c provides broad management capabilities spanning performance and diagnostics, configuration, lifecycle, and cloud management for application server environments with multiple domains. With this extensive new release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle has greatly expanded the WebLogic Server management capabilities by introducing new cloud management capabilities focused on Middleware as a Service (MWaaS). Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c provides full lifecycle management capabilities for WebLogic Server environments, both conventional and in the cloud. New cloud management features include a self service portal, with metering and chargeback based on a broad set of metrics and properties both for WebLogic Server and the underlying host environment. A new consolidation planner analyzes an existing WebLogic Server host environment and compares it to a proposed new environment to make recommendations. Taken together, these new capabilities 10
reduce operational costs and ensure the highest quality of service for WebLogic Server and Oracle Fusion Middleware investments. Streamline Cloud Provisioning with Virtual Assembly Builder Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder accelerates provisioning of multi tier applications to virtualized environments for both conventional and cloud based deployments. It simplifies deployment of cloud applications by packaging multiple software components into a single assembly a self contained unit that can be deployed, managed, and upgraded intact, throughout the lifecycle. An assembly is typically deployed onto a set of virtualized hardware resources, delivering high levels of utilization and efficiency. Authorized users can provision these assemblies in weeks, rather than spending three or four months for a typical procurement to deployment cycle. Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder depicts software assets with intuitive blueprints and templates, so you can define and deploy them quickly on any infrastructure. For example, virtual appliances might include Java EE Server, Coherence Data Grid, and software load balancer functionality, all packaged as bootable disk images with associated metadata. Being able to quickly replicate assemblies reduces the risk of configuration errors and allows for a high level of standardization and consistency across application infrastructures. Simplify Upgrades with Comprehensive Tools and Utilities While WebLogic Server 12c is a major new release, with more extensive support for Java EE 6 and a large number of new features, Oracle has taken particular care to ensure that this upgrade is seamless for WebLogic Server 11g customers. When upgrading from WebLogic Server 11g customers can utilize familiar tools including the standard domain upgrade tool, with complete configuration compatibility between releases. The upgrade can be performed across multiple releases of WebLogic 11
W eblogic is a very high performing set of technologies. It has made deploying our implementations easier, more robust certainly faster. Enterprise Architect, European Telecommunications Provider Server, from 9.2 through 10g R3 to 11g and ultimately 12c. Oracle Internet Application Server (ias) customers running version 10g R2 and 10g R3 can utilize SmartUpgrade for WebLogic to move from J2EE 1.4 environments to Java EE 5 and then on to WebLogic Server 12c. SmartUpgrade also supports GlassFish customers who want to move to WebLogic Server. Customers enjoy a seamless upgrade from previous versions of WebLogic Server, as well as from ias, GlassFish, JBoss, and other application servers, when they move to WebLogic Server 12c. In addition, Oracle and its partners have developed proven methodologies for helping customers strategically consolidate from IBM WebSphere and Red Hat JBoss to WebLogic Server 12c and other Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies. Modern and Efficient Development Environment Accelerates Time to Market With Oracle WebLogic Server 12c, Oracle has improved efficiency with a broad foundation of standards based tools that permit agile application development. Organizations enjoy faster time to market because of the productivity of Java EE 6 and its implementation in WebLogic Server 12c. These product enhancements reduce costs and speed up the process of bringing new applications and functionality to market. To enable a low cost, low risk and standard development model, Oracle WebLogic Server 12c utilizes Java Standard Edition (SE) as its core Java programming language and Java Enterprise Edition (EE) for the server side development and deployment model. The WebLogic Server development environment supports common toolsets including Maven, Hudson, Ant, and JUnit to boost developer efficiencies. For example, the Maven plugin streamlines deployments of Maven projects, with uniform builds and open source dependency management. It can be wired into the Maven lifecycle to automate these deployments without having to launch a separate console or command line deployment utility. 12
Boost Productivity with Enhanced Support for Java EE 6 Oracle introduced an initial set of Java EE 6 services in Oracle WebLogic Server 11g. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c continues this trend with complete support for Java EE 6 services and a wide variety of choices in Interactive Development Environments (IDEs). Oracle s Java EE 6 implementation provides a simple and testable programming model that doesn t require deployment descriptors, yet offers a traditional API for advanced users. It is an efficient language with fewer dependencies, enabling developers to handle simple to complex tasks. WebLogic Server 12c supports several important Java EE 6 features including a new programming model, context independency injection, and support for lightweight Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). With a focus on developer usability, WebLogic Server 12c includes broader use of annotations, IDE support for Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) and NetBeans, and a raft of enhancements for enterprises adopting Oracle Exalogic Engineered Systems. Thanks to these Java EE enhancements, WebLogic Server developers no longer need to use proprietary frameworks such as Spring. Oracle is also working with a consortium of leading technology vendors to embed cloud capabilities within the Java standard. The goal is to enable a portable, multi vendor cloud based infrastructure that leverages common development standards, permitting customers to move their applications interchangeably among vendor offerings that support these standards and to seamlessly move their infrastructure from on premise data centers to public or private cloud based data centers, and vice versa. Support Smartphones and Tablets with Mobile Development Framework Mobile applications have become a growing area of investment for most enterprises as they support users who are supplementing their desktop and laptop computers with mobile tablets and smart phones. Corporate staff and executives are asking for mobile access to the same applications they are used to having on their desktops. The challenge is to provide user friendly access in a safe, secure and scalable manner. On the server side, Oracle has made it very easy to expose business applications and data as RESTful or Web Services in a secure manner. Oracle also introduced Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Mobile to extend its popular Application Development Framework environment to accommodate mobile users. Developers can develop once and deploy to many devices and channels with a single IDE. ADF offers a common framework for mobile and desktop applications, with complete support for common mobile platforms such as ios. With a single programming model, they can address multiple platforms without having to rewrite for each target platform. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c also offers growing support for HTML 5 and Web Sockets. 13
Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports multi channel development with a single programming model and flexible rendering technology. Third Party Validation Just as Oracle and database have become synonymous, Oracle and Java application server are also becoming synonymous as more and more data centers choose Oracle for their application server needs. According to independent market assessments by multiple research firms, Oracle WebLogic Server s market share is higher than that of its four closest competitors combined. Oracle WebLogic Server s share of the application server market (Source: Gartner 2010 Worldwide Application Server Market Share report (March 2011). Gartner recently named Oracle a leader in the Enterprise Application Server Market. 14
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers (September 2011). Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers (Massimo Pezzini, Yefim V. Natis, Kimihiko Iijima, Daniel Sholler, Raffaella Faveta September 26, 2011) 2 Conclusion Oracle WebLogic Server 12c delivers mission critical Java infrastructure for enterprise applications. It is the strategic application server for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Fusion Applications, the foundation for Oracle Exalogic Engineered Systems, and a key technology in Oracle s cloud computing infrastructure. WebLogic Server 12c includes many enhancements for customers conventional deployments as well. Oracle can help WebLogic Server customers align their current state architecture with a future state that includes engineered systems and cloud deployments, protecting their existing investments and accelerating their plans to move to the architecture of the future. 2 NOTE: This Magic Quadrant graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner report is available here: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1 17GUO5Z&ct=110928&st=sb. 15
Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c January 2012 Author: David Baum Contributing Authors: Ruma Sanyal Ayalla Goldschmidt Mike Lehmann Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 01/12 16