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Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #939156]

Wed, 10 October 2012 13:30

Erik Vande Velde

Messages: 82
Registered: September 2012

Member

We are thinking of deploying our application to a virgo server in production, but I have a feeling that most spring server applications are currently deployed to tomcat or jboss. The benefit of virgo would of course be that we can use OSGI bundles, but I'm a bit uncertain about the ability of Virgo to grow with an increasing number of users (load balancing, clustering of servers, etc .. ). Does anyone have a success story with a deployment of virgo for large applications?

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #939767 is a reply to message #939156]

Thu, 11 October 2012 03:11

Jay Huang

Messages: 20
Registered: February 2012

Junior Member

good question! thanks for asking, I would like to hear some success stories too.

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #939875 is a reply to message #939767]

Thu, 11 October 2012 05:26

Tin N/A

Messages: 46
Registered: December 2010

Member

There was already some mention of this in the forum, and I can offer my example as reference.

We have (currently) Virgo 3.0.3 running a single-sign-on system (handling user registrations, logins and shared sessions) for a userbase that is reaching 1 million accounts and is taking hundreds of hits (web requests) per second in peak times. It's using EclipseLink and Atomikos as major components, and is clustered (two active-active members: JPA cache synchronized through JMS to an external ActiveMQ, Tomcat sessions synchronized using standard Tomcat TCP clustering, other shared data synchronized using Hazelcast). The environment has some customizations added internally, but underneath it's a full fledged Virgo Tomcat Server.

This system has been in production for a good year now (last 7 months of that as a cluster), with the only major outage being on July 1st when JVMs died because of a Linux bug caused by adding a leap second. It grew out of a codebase that has been running on the Spring-based OSGi since Spring DM server 1.0 milestone releases, and while I can say that the 1.0 was not really up to the task, with 2.0 it became much better and since 3.0, well, our record speaks for itself.

The problem is still that you'll have to invest quite a bit of time in learning all the intricacies of OSGi and integrating non-OSGi ready components that you need. But it's worth it, not only because you'll gain understanding of the components you use, but also because modular programming has advantages that you'll always be able to make use of - ranging from cleaner and higher-quality code that it promotes writing, resulting in better system architectures and ending with finished modules that you can reuse wherever you need them.

I myself am looking forward to Virgo 3.6.0 with JEE web-profile support - this should additionally make it much easier to deploy Spring/JEE applications without spending too much time tweaking the server and I expect it to provide the best available environment for running Spring applications in general.

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #940335 is a reply to message #939875]

Thu, 11 October 2012 14:42

Glyn Normington

Messages: 1222
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Tin N/A wrote on Thu, 11 October 2012 06:26

There was already some mention of this in the forum, and I can offer my example as reference. ...

That's a great reference. Thanks very much for providing it. Are you able to divulge your company name so I can add you to the "Virgo Powered" list on the Virgo home page?

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #940520 is a reply to message #940335]

Thu, 11 October 2012 18:13

Tin N/A

Messages: 46
Registered: December 2010

Member

Glyn Normington wrote on Thu, 11 October 2012 16:42

That's a great reference. Thanks very much for providing it. Are you able to divulge your company name so I can add you to the "Virgo Powered" list on the Virgo home page?

Sure, it's not a secret and if it can help push more people into trying Virgo I'd be glad. The company is "Croatian Telecom". PM me if you need more info.

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #940773 is a reply to message #940520]

Fri, 12 October 2012 00:15

Glyn Normington

Messages: 1222
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Thanks. PM has been disabled by the administrator, but all I would ask is if you have the time to dump the above description of your usage along with the company name in a short personal blog, it would provide a higher profile place for me to link to from the Virgo Powered list.

[Updated on: Fri, 12 October 2012 00:16]

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #944911 is a reply to message #940773]

Mon, 15 October 2012 06:52

Tin N/A

Messages: 46
Registered: December 2010

Member

Well, I'm not much of a blogger (in fact, no blogger at all), but I've managed to write a post that will hopefully be useful. So if you want, you can link here.

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #945073 is a reply to message #944911]

Mon, 15 October 2012 08:20

Glyn Normington

Messages: 1222
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Many thanks Tin - you're a blogger now. The piece is linked from the Virgo home page.

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #949160 is a reply to message #945073]

Thu, 18 October 2012 19:00

Marcelo Daniel

Messages: 4
Registered: December 2011

Junior Member

I work in MV Systems, a Brazilian company that operates in the software for hospitals. Around about seven months ago the company introduced the concept of modular applications. Because we have a great legacy applications using tomcat spring and decided to migrate to virgo. Today we are very close to putting our first product that uses osgi in production. Until then we test environments application has fared very well. The server has been quite stable. Because it is a web application still have trouble performing updates at runtime without lose the http session.

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #959102 is a reply to message #949160]

Fri, 26 October 2012 13:02

Mastah Naleh

Messages: 32
Registered: April 2012

Member

Hi there!

It's bit off topic but I would like (if possible) that you explain me how to cluster virgo.
As per what Tin N/A said, he is using a cluster of virgo server. I'm really interested in how you can do that and what's necessary to do it ?

[Updated on: Fri, 26 October 2012 13:11]

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #959128 is a reply to message #959102]

Fri, 26 October 2012 13:29

Tin N/A

Messages: 46
Registered: December 2010

Member

Mastah Naleh wrote on Fri, 26 October 2012 15:02

Hi there!

It's bit off topic but I would like (if possible) that you explain me how to cluster virgo.

Hi,

you don't actually cluster Virgo as such. You cluster your application running in Virgo, or to be more precise - components of your application.

Virgo supports clustering HTTP sessions out of the box because it uses Tomcat and so standard Tomcat session clustering can be configured. Check Tomcat's documentation on how to configure HTTP session clustering, write that configuration into tomcat-server.xml in Virgo's configuration directory and you're set to go. Don't forget to put <distributable/> in your application's web.xml.

Other components of your application can be clustered using 3rd party libraries like Hazelcast. Any data in your application that you need shared between multiple instances you can store in one of the storage collections that Hazelcast provides.

So the key is simply to identify what data you need replicated in your application when multiple instances are running, and choosing the best way to make that replication happen. When you have multiple instances of Virgo with your application running and cluster-aware (i.e. with all the relevant data shared and synchronized between the instances), the only thing left is putting a load-balancer in front of them all and let him take care of monitoring and delegating requests to every instance.

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #959209 is a reply to message #959128]

Fri, 26 October 2012 14:37

Mastah Naleh

Messages: 32
Registered: April 2012

Member

So, indeed, it does really look like a cluster of a standard webapp.

Thanks for the information!

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Re: Is Virgo used in production environments? [message #964544 is a reply to message #959209]

Tue, 30 October 2012 16:00

Glyn Normington

Messages: 1222
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

The OSGi Alliance are keen to promote success stories. If anyone on this thread would be willing to provide some basic information about your use of Virgo/OSGi, please email me at (disposable email address) gninquiry-osgicasestudy@yahoo.co.uk.

I should mention that I will not forward email addresses to third parties, including the OSGi Alliance, without your permission (or to VMware/SpringSource sales personnel for that matter). I'm simply interested in gathering information about how OSGi is used.

[Updated on: Tue, 30 October 2012 16:14]

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