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klakshminarayan1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 24, 2015
Question

Windchill Parallel Environment.

  • February 24, 2015
  • 18 replies
  • 7998 views

Hello All,


I just wanted to know if any one has setup a parallel Windchill environment for Disaster Recovery. Is there a way to setup Windchill Architecture so if one Windchill system goes down or install updates, we can switch to the other Windchill system.


Any ideas would be helpful.


Thanks,


Kiran Lakshminarayanan


18 replies

B
BineshKumar11-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 24, 2015
Hello Kiran
If your infrastructure is virtualized, you have a wide variety of
options.
Technology to chosen based on RPO and RTO targets and solutions vary
from Storage replication to crash consistent fail over.
Vsphere Replication, SRM and Zerto are some of the technologies on which
I have worked with.

Thanks,


Binesh Kumar

8020 Forsyth Boulevard | St. Louis, MO 63105-1707

+1 (314) 583-1193

Binesh.Kumar@b-wi.com
J
jessh12-Amethyst
12-Amethyst
February 24, 2015
If you are on Windchill 10.2 and have a cluster, then:

1. Various cluster nodes can fail while the others continue (as in
older releases)
2. You can allow multiple nodes to process each background queue so as
to have hot failover of queue processing (since 10.0)
3. The cache master node can fail and another node will automatically
take up this role (new in 10.2)

The only single point of failure that I'm aware of is Solr, where
currently only 1 instance can be run in the cluster. If Solr is down, I
believe searches fallback to being database-based. If
higher-availability of Solr is critical, then one should be able to
apply various hot node replacement technologies.

There are other technical options for file storage, database,
WindchillDS, etc.

--
Jess Holle

D
dpoisson1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 25, 2015

Jess,


We have implemented the various techniques you mentioned in our Windchill environment to support DR and HA requirements.



Do you know of any companies that have successfully been able to deploy Windchill builds without incurring long system outages?Our customers are looking to eliminate / minimizethe down timeassociated with deploying new capabilities and bug fixes to the system.



Thank you in advance for any insight you may be able to provide.



Danny N. Poisson


Raytheon Company


C
clawrenz-21-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 25, 2015
Dan,

I have seen the same issues with many of our clients and their Test and Dev environments as typically they have them configured as different rehosted Windchill systems.

I have addressed these issues by configuring the Test and Dev environments differently.

The simplification of rolling out new builds can be accomplished by configuring your test environment as a clone of you production environment (not a rehost). This requires
some local configuration of the test servers hosts files (to isolate naming conflicts with production servers) and only requires changing a few wt.properties settings to allow the Test and Dev servers to have their own URL’s. We have been successfully using such a configuration on both Monolithic and Clustered environments.

When setup properly, your Database, LDAP and codebase will be identical to production, so rolling out an update can be accomplished by updating your test and environment and after validation simply copy over the codebase and import the updated database and LDAP form the test system exports. This configuration also removes any risks associated with changing the production environment when implementing new changes and can be accomplished with much less time and effort.

Additional benefits of this configuration is that it makes it pretty trivial to refresh the Test & Dev systems with updated data from Production.


Best Regards,

Carsten Lawrenz
KALYPSO<">http://kalypso.com/?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=kalypsosig>
MOBILE
415.378.6374
kalypsonian.com/Carsten.Lawrenz<">http://kalypsonian.com/Carsten.Lawrenz>

[cidSmiley Very Happy1A412BA-60B4-42EC-869F-9D62EBA1B3C7]

On Feb 25, 2015, at 9:38 AM, Danny Poisson <-<<a style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline&quot;=" target="_BLANK" href="mailto:-">>">mailto:->> wrote:


Jess,

We have implemented the various techniques you mentioned in our Windchill environment to support DR and HA requirements.



Do you know of any companies that have successfully been able to deploy Windchill builds without incurring long system outages? Our customers are looking to eliminate / minimize the down time associated with deploying new capabilities and bug fixes to the system.



Thank you in advance for any insight you may be able to provide.

Danny N. Poisson

Raytheon Company

D
dpoisson1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 25, 2015
Carsten,

Thank you for sending the information on how you are deploying builds. My
next question is what happens to any work done on the live system that
occurs while build is being deployed on the clone system? I am assuming it
will be overwritten during the database import.

Danny N. Poisson
PDM IT Solution Architect
Common PDM Technical Director

Corporate Information Technology
Raytheon Company
(Cell) +1.978.888.3696
-

880 Technology Park Drive
Billerica, MA 01821 USA

Business Travel

PTO Plans
3/6

This message contains information that may be confidential and privileged.
Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive mail for the
addressee), you should not use, copy or disclose to anyone this message or
any information contained in this message. If you have received this
message in error, please so advise the sender by reply e-mail and delete
this message. Thank you for your cooperation.


D
ddemay1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 25, 2015
Everyone does different levels of changes. Why the requirement to deploy to
production hot? You do not see this often as with all information systems,
typically there are windows for maintenance.

How long does your build take to deploy on average?



On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 11:57 AM, Danny N Poisson <-<br/>> wrote:

> Carsten,
>
> Thank you for sending the information on how you are deploying builds. My
> next question is what happens to any work done on the live system that
> occurs while build is being deployed on the clone system? I am assuming it
> will be overwritten during the database import.
>
> *Danny N. Poisson*
> PDM IT Solution Architect
> Common PDM Technical Director
>
> Corporate Information Technology
> Raytheon Company
> (Cell) +1.978.888.3696
> -* <->
>
> 880 Technology Park Drive
> Billerica, MA 01821 USA
>
> Business Travel
>
> PTO Plans
> 3/6
>
> *This message contains information that may be confidential and
> privileged. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive mail for
> the addressee), you should not use, copy or disclose to anyone this message
> or any information contained in this message. If you have received this
> message in error, please so advise the sender by reply e-mail and delete
> this message. Thank you for your cooperation.*
>
> [image: Inactive hide details for Carsten Lawrenz ---02/25/2015 11:30:38
> AM---Dan, I have seen the same issues with many of our clients]Carsten
> Lawrenz ---02/25/2015 11:30:38 AM---Dan, I have seen the same issues with
> many of our clients and their Test and Dev environments as typ
>
B
BineshKumar11-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 25, 2015
Applying it one of the cluster nodes and rsync it to other nodes
(modified & new) is what we follow. We should omit node specific files
- xconfs etc. These entire steps could be scripted and over a TWINAX 10G
network, it requires only limited downtime to copy over the updates

Thanks,


Binesh Kumar

8020 Forsyth Boulevard | St. Louis, MO 63105-1707

+1 (314) 583-1193

Binesh.Kumar@b-wi.com

C
clawrenz-21-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 25, 2015
Dan,

Ideally In that scenario you want to leverage your Dev environment.

The process will vary depending on what exactly you are rolling out so this is just a general overview and workflow.

1. Do all of the development work and get your configuration and changes documented on Dev.
2. Refresh your Test environment with Production data exports and make a backup of Test environment
3. Install new functionality developed on Dev onto the Test system and validate functionality
4. If you run into validation issues, revert to your Test backup and go to step 3.

After Successful Validation and ready for Go Live

6. Backup your Production System (Copy or Rename PTC/Windchill_10.2 to PTC/Windchill_10.2_bak)
7. Redo Steps 2-3
8. Sync Test environment out to Production (new PTC/Windchill_10.2, implement production site.xconf changes, import updated DB/LDAP from Test)
9. Validate Production functionality
10. If issues are found simply revert to your Production backup.


Also note, if you are running a Clustered Production environment, your Test environment should be clustered as well.


Best Regards,

Carsten Lawrenz
KALYPSO<">http://kalypso.com/?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=kalypsosig>
MOBILE
415.378.6374
kalypsonian.com/Carsten.Lawrenz<">http://kalypsonian.com/Carsten.Lawrenz>



On Feb 25, 2015, at 10:57 AM, Danny N Poisson <-<<a style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline&quot;=" target="_BLANK" href="mailto:-">>">mailto:->> wrote:


Carsten,

Thank you for sending the information on how you are deploying builds. My next question is what happens to any work done on the live system that occurs while build is being deployed on the clone system? I am assuming it will be overwritten during the database import.

Danny N. Poisson
PDM IT Solution Architect
Common PDM Technical Director

Corporate Information Technology
Raytheon Company
(Cell) +1.978.888.3696
-<">mailto:->

880 Technology Park Drive
Billerica, MA 01821 USA

Business Travel

PTO Plans
3/6

This message contains information that may be confidential and privileged. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive mail for the addressee), you should not use, copy or disclose to anyone this message or any information contained in this message. If you have received this message in error, please so advise the sender by reply e-mail and delete this message. Thank you for your cooperation.

<graycol.gif>Carsten Lawrenz ---02/25/2015 11:30:38 AM---Dan, I have seen the same issues with many of our clients and their Test and Dev environments as typ
B
BineshKumar11-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 25, 2015
Exporting and importing large databases(>=1 TB) even using parallel
data pumps on a best tuned database would take significant time unless
you are using any advanced fast clone technologies.

Thanks
Binesh
Barry Wehmiller
D
dpoisson1-Visitor
1-Visitor
February 25, 2015
David,

To support a global application it is hard to find down-times that work for
everyone.

The amount of time depends on what we are deploying (new capabilities, bug
fixes, data corrections, PTC critical patch sets), but on average it takes
5 - 8 hours from end to end.


Danny N. Poisson
PDM IT Solution Architect
Common PDM Technical Director

Corporate Information Technology
Raytheon Company
(Cell) +1.978.888.3696
-

880 Technology Park Drive
Billerica, MA 01821 USA

Business Travel

PTO Plans
3/6

This message contains information that may be confidential and privileged.
Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive mail for the
addressee), you should not use, copy or disclose to anyone this message or
any information contained in this message. If you have received this
message in error, please so advise the sender by reply e-mail and delete
this message. Thank you for your cooperation.


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