Scan Legacy Application

1. You are using a Developer Environment that has already been installed.
2. Cloud Pak for Applications has already been installed in the environment.
3. You have Docker Desktop running on your laptop (one of the prerequisites).

Business need

Project hill

• Who: Operations teams are tasked with moving existing Java applications from traditional WebSphere ND to “the Cloud” and don’t have access to developers for the majority of the legacy Java portfolio.

• What: This is an application that users still need. They consider it good enough as-is: While bug fixes and new features might be desirable, the aren’t worth the expense. Or step 1 for making the app more maintainable is moving it to the cloud where it’ll be easier to improve it using modern development techniques like continuous deployment. The operations team needs to move to “the Cloud” and wants to standardize on Docker containers that they can run anywhere.

• Wow: With a few simple steps, you can move an application and the associated configuration to a Liberty runtime in a Docker container without changing code. This is something that can be repeated over and over on many apps in the portfolio in a factory type engagement.

Architecture

Technical Requirements

• No code changes — You don’t even have access to source code
• The target is to get the application running on Liberty in a Open Shift Cluster on IBM Cloud
• The IBM Cloud based DB2 Service is used for Database connectivity

Guide

• Run a pre-configured instance of traditional WebSphere in a Docker container on your laptop to simulate the existing customer environment
• Use the data collector in Transformation Advisor to scan the WebSphere runtime and the PlantsByWebSphere application
• Load the scan results in to Transformation Advisor running in the IBM Cloud environment’s Red Hat OpenShift cluster
• Review the Transformation Advisor analysis
• Use the Open Shift S2I to build a Docker image with Liberty and deploy the application in the IBM Cloud Open Shift Cluster
• Access the newly created application on Container based Light weight Open Liberty

Scan the existing application

• Desktop/Laptop
• Cloud Shell

Setup

• Clone the repository to your machine

  git clone https://github.com/ibm-cloud-architecture/icp-dev-workshop.git
  cd icp-dev-workshop/lab4/CreatePreConfiguredtWASContainer
  Copied!

• Review the Dockerfile, see that the Docker image will contain:

  • The DB2 JDBC drivers
  • wsadmin scripts — Used to configure the WebSphere application server for the PlantsByWebSphere application
  • Compiled application EAR files
  • The data collector in Transformation Advisor — This was split in to 50mb chunks so it could easily be stored in GIT

• Review the customCmd.properties file

  This file is used to ensure that the data collector scans all of the files in the application. By default, the data collector ignores Java classes in the com.ibm.websphere packages, as well as packages that are typically used by open-source JARs such as net and org packages. These packages are ignored because they typically contain code that the client doesn’t own, so any issues found by Transformation Advisor would be false positives. This becomes a problem when the client’s code is in a package such as net or org because the scanner will ignore their Java code.

  evaluation=--evaluate --excludePackages=com.informix,com.microsoft,com.sybase,com.sun,java,javax,net,org,oracle,sqlj,_ibmjsp --includePackages=com.ibm
  migration_liberty=--analyze --sourceAppServer=was855 --targetAppServer=liberty --targetCloud=dockerIBMCloud --includePackages=com.ibm --excludePackages=com.informix,com.microsoft,com.sybase,com.sun,java,javax,net,org,oracle,sqlj,_ibmjsp
  migration_was=--analyze --sourceAppServer=was855 --targetAppServer=was90 --targetCloud=vmIBMCloud --includePackages=com.ibm --excludePackages=com.informix,com.microsoft,com.sybase,com.sun,java,javax,net,org,oracle,sqlj,_ibmjsp
  #inventory=--inventory --excludeFiles=".*/directory/LargeXMLFileName.xml"
  #featureList=--featureList --excludeFiles=".*/directory/LargeXMLFileName.xml"
  #java_opt=-Xmx2g
  Copied!

• Review the wsadmin.py file.
  Note : If the WAS Environment is set up using the Lab Procedure, no changes would be required. Incase if you are using your custom WAS and DB2 environment, ensure you have the serverName and port are correctly mapped to the Database.

  • Ensure that the serverName and port for the DataSources match the values of your DB2 database (above).

• Build the Docker image

  docker build -t twas-plantsbywebsphere .
  Copied!

• Review the Docker image for traditional WebSphere Application Server

  $ docker images | grep websphere
  REPOSITORY                      TAG                         IMAGE ID        CREATED          SIZE
  ibmcom/websphere-traditional    profile                     67b52a4c08ad    12 months ago    1.75GB
  ibmcom/websphere-liberty        webProfile7-ubi-min-amd64   34544a83c068     3 weeks ago      446MB
  Copied!

  (The websphere-liberty image is shown here for comparison. You may not see it in your registry (yet).)

  You may be wondering: If traditional WebSphere runs in a Docker container, then why are we moving to Liberty?

  • One reason: 1.75GB!! (The Liberty image is 446MB, one-quarter the size.)

  • Another reason: Having to hardcode configuration values in configuration files (like in the previous step) because traditional WebSphere can’t read configuration from environment variables

• Start an instance of the Docker image

  docker run -d -p 9080:9080 -p 9443:9443 -p 9060:9060 -p 9043:9043 -v "$(pwd)":/data --name twas-plantsbywebsphere twas-plantsbywebsphere:latest
  Copied!

• Tail the logs for the Docker container and wait for the message shown below:

  $ docker logs -f twas-plantsbywebsphere
  ...
  *** CERTIFICATES THAT ARE EXPIRED OR BEYOND THE EXPIRATION THRESHOLD AND HAVE BEEN REPLACED ***;
  CWPKI0645I: Personal certificate alias "default" in KeyStore "NodeDefaultKeyStore((cell):DefaultCell01:(node):DefaultNode01)" was REPLACED.
  CWPKI0645I: Personal certificate alias "default" in KeyStore "NodeRSATokenKeyStore((cell):DefaultCell01:(node):DefaultNode01)" was REPLACED.
  Copied!

  This message is expected because this version of the traditional WebSphere Docker image is over 12 months old and the SSL certificates have expired.

• Restart the container to refresh these SSL certificates

  docker stop twas-plantsbywebsphere
  docker start twas-plantsbywebsphere
  Copied!

• Tail the logs for the Docker container and wait for the message shown below:

  $ docker logs -f twas-plantsbywebsphere
  ...
  WSVR0001I: Server server1 open for e-business
  Copied!

• Log in to the Administrative Console

  https://localhost:9043/ibm/console

  NOTE: The console requires secure HTTP. Chrome and Safari block https://localhost and recently don’t allow exceptions. You may need to use Firefox to log in to the console. Firefox blocks, but gives you the option to proceed anyways.

  username: wsadmin password: passw0rd

• Navigate to Applications --> Application Types --> WebSphere enterprise applications and verify that you see HelloWorld and PlantsByWebsphere8

  

• Navigate to Resources --> JDBC --> DataSources and verify that you see PlantsByWebSphereDataSource and PlantsByWebSphereDataSourceNONJTA. These are the two DataSources that will be detected by the data collector.

  

• Log out of the Administrative Console

• Access PlantsByWebSphere using http://localhost:9080/PlantsByWebSphere

  

Download Datacollector From Transformation Advisor

• Access the Transformation Advisor Page to Download the data collector. The TA access link can be referred as part of the Cloud Native Toolkit menu, in the open shift dashboard.

• Click on the “Add a new workspace (+) Button”. The Enter the Name for the Workspace (Example: AppMod_{initials})

• Now Create a new Collection and provide a name for the collection and click on ‘Save’. (Example: was_ta)

• The Datacollector / Upload data screen appears as shown

  

• Now click on the Data collector Button to navigate to the Data collector User interface

  

• Select the Operating system of the Application WAS Server Environment. Then Click download.

• Copy the installable zip to the Application WAS Server Environment.

  docker cp {downloaded tgz file name}.tgz twas-plantsbywebsphere:/demo
  Copied!

Run the data collector

• Enter the twas-plantsbywebsphere Docker container

  docker exec -it twas-plantsbywebsphere bash
  Copied!

• Extract the downloaded tgz file

  tar xvfz {downloaded tgz file name}.tgz
  Copied!

• Navigate to the data collector directory

  cd /demo/transformationadvisor-2.0.3
  Copied!

• Execute the data collector

  ./bin/transformationadvisor -w /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer -p AppSrv01 wsadmin passw0rd
  Copied!

• When prompted, accept the License agreement

• After a few minutes, you will either see a “Thank you for uploading your data. You can proceed to the application UI for doing further analysis.” message or an error related to “unable to upload the data” which will occur if the data collector can’t access the Transformation Advisor UI which is running in Red Hat OpenShift.

  

• Verify that the results zip file has been created

  $ ls -la AppSrv01.zip
  -rw-r--r-- 1 was was 340860 Nov 22 15:32 AppSrv01.zip
  Copied!

• Use CTRL+D to exit from the Docker container

• Copy the AppSrv01.zip file from within the Docker container to your local disk

  docker cp twas-plantsbywebsphere:/demo/transformationadvisor-2.0.3/AppSrv01.zip .
  Copied!

• Stop and remove the Docker container

  docker stop twas-plantsbywebsphere
  docker rm twas-plantsbywebsphere
  Copied!

Summary