Failover and Recovery of Enterprise Applications

Failover and Recovery of Enterprise Applications - Part 1

In enterprise application architecture, it is naïve to assume that none of the software/hardware components will go down. In fact, most of the IT managers and architects acknowledge this. However, a well-tested and robust recovery procedure continues to take a back seat when designing and implementing software projects. In several scenarios, administrators end up performing basic failover testing by shutting down the processes and verifying that the subsequent requests succeeded.

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Thirunavukarasu commented on the 4 Feb 2006

A neatly explained technical atricle. Very useful, very crisp. Thanks .

Viktor Lioutyi commented on the 12 Aug 2005

Hi,

How to test failover in automatic manner?

"In several scenarios, administrators end up performing basic failover testing by shutting down the processes and verifying that the subsequent requests succeeded.

Although this level of testing can satisfy the failover requirements for the records, more robust failover testing needs to be performed to ensure a proper recovery if failures do occur."

We did the manual testing and failover worked. But we would like to do automatic testing of failover to make sure that it works for all our 1000+ pages. BEA does not have any tool for such testing.

There are different reasons why someone may want to test all pages for failover.

1) WebLogic only replicates attributes that were modified. Call of session's setAttribute() method is an indication for WebLogic that attribute was modified. This call may be done explicitly or implicitly when jsp tags are used. It is possible that on some pages members of complex attributes were modified but WebLogic was not notified about it, so it will not replicate such attributes.

2) Complex attributes may reference other objects and attributes. After replication these references may be broken. For example, attribute A and B references object C. Only attribute A was modified, so only A will be replicated. After the replication A and B may point to different copies of C and program may not work correctly anymore.

3) Some objects are assumed to be singletons. Developer needs to provide special implementation for serialization to support replication of singleton objects. If this implementation is omitted, then replication may create copies of a singleton object.

4) Transient fields are not going to be replicated but there should be a recovery code that restores values of these fields after replication. Without testing we do not know if all our recovery code works correctly or not.

There are probably other reasons too.

Does anybody know about any tool for automatic testing of failover (or at least just session replication) for WebLogic and/or WebSphere?

Thanks,
Viktor

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