As I mentioned before, I wanted to create a demo of DataPower vs the WBI Suite for the conference that I attended today. The goal was to try and show the ‘wow’ factor of DataPower and turn a product that most only know from marketing slides into something real that could insprise the attendees. I came up short of that goal mostly due to time restraints and having some MQ issues. I thought that I would document the parts that cost me a lot of time:

1. Installing MQ in SuSe 10 Fixpack 2 is easy. The part that I forgot is that there is configuration that needs to occur after that. Learning of commands like runmqlsr or  strmqm took awhile.
2. Creating a bridged network using VirtualBox is not as straightforward as it is with VMWare. I had to track down a script that would automatically configure the bridge before I started the VM.
3. Know what IP address your datapower box is setup for. I didn’t have this information when I first got the box in the mail. If you have no idea what IP address it’s using, be sure that you have a serial cable and more importantly a computer with a serial port. My T60 doesn’t have one and there was no docking station handy.
4. Industry Standard Schemas aren’t easy to get your hands on. I thought I would use the HL7 schema but you have to be a member to download it. I found a draft but at that point, I just wanted a large schema and didn’t care about the actual payload.
5. I wasted an insane amount of time with amqsput sample application that can put a message onto a queue. It only accepts input via stdin, so I thought I would be smart and pipe my 500k XML as input. I was puzzled when I saw 5000 messages enter my queue. They were created because my XML contained CF/LFs and that sample app interpreted them as separate messages.
6. I wasted an insane amount of time with amqsput after I filtered out the CF/LFs. I then saw 9 messages created on my queue. It took me awhile to learn which mq command I could use to see the contents of a message on the queue and I realized that each message was 64k, the console limit for standard-in. I then had to recreate my XML/XSD validation to use a smaller XML file.
7. My laptop can’t push enough data into MQ to actually get the box at 100% utilization. I was maxed out in the CPU of my virtualbox VM. I think if this scenario were to be a little more fair, the WebSphere server would have to be pushed off the box as well as the application that drops messages on the queue. I was trying to do everything on one laptop.

Funny part is, the actual datapower work was pretty straightforward. I created an MQ Queue Manager and once I actually got the TCP listener port up everything worked fine. Creating a Multi-Protocol Gateway and rules to transform and encrypt were equally easy.

Anyway, it’s still cool to have my hands on an actual datapower XI50. It’s heavier than you think

Related Posts

• DataPower 3.8.1 and WebSphere MQ
• WB552: Local DataPower XI50 (Blue) Initial Configuration Issues
• IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances Part I: Overview and Getting Started
• Perficient Booth at the IBM WebSphere SOA Connectivity Briefing in Toronto
• WB552: Random DataPower Thoughts Part 12

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