BW5.X - How to set-up a robust BusinessWorks 5.X domain

Even if this is easy to set-up a BusinessWorks 5.X domain there are still a few important recommendations to follow.

Architecture

A production configuration should always use a database back-end and an EMS transport.

Domain configuration

It is recommended to create your domain using the domainutilitycmd utilities and the CreateDomain.xml template file available in the <TIBCO_HOME>/tra/5.X/template/domainutility/cmdline folder.

Configure the domain with the following options (names of the configuration elements below are referring to the name of XML tags in the CreateDomain.xml file):

. Encoding=UTF-8 (or another one that fit with your environment)

. MaxDeploymentRevision= 5 (it is a good practice to limit the size of the deployment history to ensure deployment duration doesn’t increase with time)

. Leave the ApplicationRVParameters and HawkRVParameters sections commented

. Uncomment the EMSParameters section and set the value of the configuration elements according to your domain EMS configuration (note that even if you have a single EMS instance it is recommended to use an EMS FT URL)

. Uncomment the HawkHMAParameters section, default values can be kept except for the RvNetwork element that can be set to 127.0.0.1 for the Hawk / Rendezvous traffic to remain local

. Uncomment the DatabaseConfiguration section and set the value of the configuration elements according to your domain database configuration. When the number of applications is less than fifty it is recommended to set the value of the DatabaseMaxConnections parameter to approximately the number of applications in the domain (it can be a bit less). When the number of applications is high the DatabaseMaxConnections parameter can be set to around 30–50 % of the number of applications (but not less than 50).

Domain creation

Once the CreateDomain.xml file has been edited, the domain can be created with the command line flavor of the domainutility tool using the following command :

domainutilitycmd -cmdFile <PathOfTheCreateDomain.xmlFile> -verbose

This creates the database tables in the domain database and the folders and files of the domain on the local machine. By default this is created in the following directories :

<TIBCO_HOME>/tra/domain><DOMAIN_NAME>

<TIBCO_HOME>/administrator/domain><DOMAIN_NAME>

Note that the location of these two folders can be changed using the following XML tags of the CreateDomain.xml file :

. TRADomainHome

. AdminDomainHome

In case of problems you can delete the ‘tra’ and ‘administrator’ folders and re execute the utility (note that in that case the domain database content is lost).

Configuration update

It is recommended to update the java heap size of the Hawk agent and TIBCO Administrator server.

For the Hawk agent this can be done by editing the hawkagent_<DOMAIN_NAME>.tra file (from the <TIBCO_HOME>/tra/domain><DOMAIN_NAME> folder) to set the value of the java.heap.size.max property to 512 MB, for example:

java.heap.size.max=512M

For the Administrator server this can be done by editing the administrator_<DOMAIN_NAME>.tra file (from the <TIBCO_HOME>/administrator/domain><DOMAIN_NAME> folder) to set the value of the java.heap.size.max property to 1024 MB, for example:

java.heap.size.max=1024m

One more thing

It is also important to put in place the EMS connection and reconnection best practices to ensure the BusinessWorks engines will always be connected to the EMS server.

This is covered in the following article :