Maximo as a service on Google Cloud Platform

 

Welcome, in this series we will learn, how to host Maximo on Google Cloud Platform.

 

 

Prerequisites

Google console access ( sign in to get 300 $ credit)

Lets get started.

Create the VM instance from the compute engine, this VM will host our Web Sphere Server.

I have selected windows 2008 R2 with 2 processors and 7.5 Gb of RAM.

Download the RDP file and generate a password for maxadmin( Create a new user)

Step 2

Connect to the instance via the RDP and install the WebSphere ND server.

 

Step 3

Lets create a Deployment manager profile for WebSphere.

 

 

 

 

Important:

Make sure the hostname you specify here, should be a proper DNS or internal IP of the host which is not supposed to change on boot.Also make sure other servers (database or federate node is inside same subnet and you are able to ping this host from there, else you won’t be able to federate or connect to database)

 

I am not enabling security for now.

 

 

Accept all the default ports for node and deployment manager.

 

Register web sphere as a service.

 

Lets create a web server definition.

 

 

 

Review and accept.

 

Lets start the first steps console and start our Deployment manager, application server and web server.

 

Now web sphere is installed, lets get our database VM created.

 

Go to Compute engine and create a new VM created and choose application snapshot for SQL Server 2014 on windows 2012 R2.

 

 

 

Lets boot our VM and create a new database called maxdb76 using the management studio.

Make sure you enable SQL authentication of the database engine because you will be connecting to this database from another server in subnet, you can use windows authentication if you are using servers under same domain controller.

In our case we are on same subnet 10.148.0.* and both will work.

 

 

Tip:

If you change the database authentication from windows to SQL, by right clicking the database engine and going to security tab, you will have to log out and restart the SQL agent from the services, else it won’t take affect.

 

 

Please create a maximo user from the securities option in the object explorer window and add a maximo user to the windows domain controller also, select default database as maxdb76 and assign sysadmin permissions for maximo user.

Now our database is ready and lets check if it is listening on port 1433.

 

So your services are ready, you should be able to connect to this from your admin system and start the maxinst or you can move an existing database to this instance via the AZURE tool.

Tip:

In case you are doing maxinst from another VM instance which is on same subnet, you don’t need to change any firewall rule but if you plan to move an existing database to this instance using the tool mentioned above, you won’t be able to connect from outside on the 1433 port, you will have to add a firewall rule.

Go to VM and edit configuration, click on the network tab(default) and open the firewall configuration.Add a new rule to allow all tcp on port 1433 so that the azure tool can connect from outside the google network.

 

So now our application server and database are ready, lets deploy the ear and test this deployment.

Please note, this is a single node vertical cluster deployment where webserver connects to all the JVMs on a single node.

If you face an error of minor version of class while starting the maximo.ear file as shown below.

Invalid class file format in C:\IBM\WebSphereND\AppServer\profiles\Dmgr02\wstemp\appmgmt\mbean\AppManagement_15bc9f0e5bf_1\app_15bca17dc1f\dpl\dpl_MAXIMO._\maximo.ear\EarContent\mboejbclient.jar(psdi/security/ejb/AccessTokenProviderRemote.class). The major.minor version '51.0' is too recent for this tool to understand.

It means you need to use the JDK 1.7.1 because the compile code needs to run on the latest version of Java.

Lets check what all jdk’s are available in the system.

 

Make sure node is started before you enable the SDK and it is in sync with the cell.

 

 

Do the same for deployment manager profile.

 

 

In case you have copied over the web sphere installation from another server by directly copying the IBM\WebSphere folder, it might not work OOB on Google cloud,  you might get errors like ( file not found or access denied for files,so here are a few tips:

• You might need to assign full control to \users of the VM, check in folder security for all the folders, including web sphere/ plugins / http server / toolbox
• You might need to check the folder paths (e.g httpd.conf might have wrong path) which can prevent HTTP server from starting.
• You might need to regenerate the plugin via the WCT, the older one might refer old host names.

 

Ok, lets restart the http server/ node and Dmgr and test the application, also make sure your virtual host has entry for webserver port #80.

 

So in this tutorial we learnt how to install WebSphere and configure Maximo on Google Cloud platform and provide it as a service to customers. In the next part of this tutorial we will see the advanced concepts of load balancing, horizontal clustering and failovers on Google Cloud platform.

 

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