Best Practices for Deploying WebLogic Server

Over the history of WebLogic Server, customer experience has revealed a number of best practices for deployment. This section covers some of the best practices that you should keep in mind when designing your own WebLogic Server deployment.

Design for Security

It is very important that the architecture of a WebLogic Server deployment be designed with security in mind. Firewalls and other components mentioned in this chapter are all essential to secure WebLogic Server or any other server. In addition, definitely make use of a Web DMZ to isolate any breaches that might occur in your system.

Securing Your Platform

While many architects for WebLogic Server design their deployment for security, they oftentimes forget to secure their deployment platform. Do not forget to review the available documentation for your deployment platform OS for techniques to secure the operating system and hardware platform on which you will run WebLogic Server.

Also, do not forget to follow all of the steps in the WebLogic Server documentation regarding securing your WebLogic Server deployment. A bad configuration can result in open security holes that attackers can exploit.

Test and Stage Your Application

In today's Web world, fast and easy development should not be taken as an excuse for not thoroughly testing your WebLogic Server application. One of the biggest mistakes that WebLogic Server developers make is rushing too quickly to deployment.

It is a best practice to develop a test plan that covers testing and quality assurance for your WebLogic Server application. In addition, consider creating a staging environment for your application. If possible, this environment should be identical to your real production environment. Test your application in a staging area to be sure that you will see the performance and quality that you desire.

Deploy your WebLogic Server application only after thoroughly assuring its quality through testing. If possible, write your tests before you write your code. It will assist in locating bugs and also help in solidifying requirements.

Load Testing Your Application

Capacity planning information for WebLogic Server is included as Chapter 15 in this book. We strongly recommend that you work with this guide to develop the appropriate hardware for your system. But, even with the best capacity planning efforts, you cannot be sure that you will have enough hardware and the proper configuration to support the client load that you expect.

One of the greatest mistakes made in application deployment is the failure to test against high loads. Therefore, you should estimate how many clients you will want to service as a maximum. Use one of the available load-testing tools such as WebBench (http://www.webbench.com/), Mercury Interactive LoadRunner (http://www.mercuryinteractive.com/), or any of the other available Web load-testing tools to test the Web components in your application. For application clients, you probably will need to create your own load-testing applications.

Absolutely do not deploy your application without testing it for handling high loads.

Don't Get Too Creative

This best practice applies to any enterprise software purchase: Do not get creative. Ask your software vendor what configurations they test. How often do they test those configurations? What is their hardware configuration? What type of network do they use? What type of JVM do they use? Get that information and replicate one of the regularly tested configurations in your own deployment.

WebLogic Server is certified to work under a given set of configurations and platforms. It is a best practice to review the documentation for WebLogic Server as to what configurations are tested. Do not stray from those configurations in order to prevent the risk of failure. Similarly, WebLogic Server is tested in the recommended configurations described in this chapter. Plan these configurations in order to minimize the possibility of malfunction or poor performance due to configuration or architecture issues.

Avoid creative architectures in your WebLogic Server deployment. With so many moving parts, go with the herd to ensure your success.

Minimize the Number of Moving Parts

A number of options exist for WebLogic Server deployments. The most simple of these involves WebLogic Server being placed behind a Web routing solution. Currently a number of these products, both hardware and software, integrate directly with WebLogic Server out-of-the-box. An off-the-shelf configuration should be considered strongly because it minimizes the number of moving parts in a deployment. Minimizing the number of moving parts means that there are fewer things that can break.