WebSphere Application Server & Liberty

IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor 2.4.4 is now available!
If Transformation Advisor is new to you read then read this blurb first

At a glance TA 2.4.4 gives you a number of great new capabilities.
I created a video that goes through each of these capabilities in detail, you can view it here
 


User Experience
There are some great user experience enhancements in the TA 2.4.4 release of Transformation Advisor.  The headline item is the fact that the WebSphere Liberty information that you see in the recommendations screen will now appear in the reports. There are a number of other minor fixes as well to improve the look of the reports, and you can now export the reports for all your targets with a single click.

The rebranding of Transformation Advisor has been taken to the next level. You get better control of the text appearing in the header, and you can customize every icon that you see on the landing screen carousel. This feature came out of work we did with a large banking customer who wanted to clearly show that Transformation Advisor had their seal of approval and had been validated as a secure and trustworthy tool. Which it is!

There are some migration targets that do not natively support JAXRPC and Transformation Advisor detects this and lets you know. However in some cases Transformation Advisor was failing to spot that some applications used their own axis infrastructure to leverage JAXRPC. This infrastructure is migrated with the application and so it means that you don't have to do any additional development work.  We now are much better at detecting this case - so if you load existing data into TA 2.4.4 the development cost for some applications may fall. Which is good obviously.

Data Collection
By default the Data Collector scans every application in the profiles that you select. Sometimes you don't want to do this - for example there may be applications that you know you do not plan to migrate, or there may be applications that are taking a very long time to scan and you want to scan them later. Up to now Transformation Advisor  had the capability to scan every application, or a specified list of applications. TA 2.4.4 adds the capability to scan every application in a profile except for those specified. So now you don't need to figure out every application in a profile just to skip the one you don't want!

Here is an example command to skip an application called activitysession.ear
transformationadvisor -w /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/ -p wasServer01 --skip-applications activitysession.ear
Check out the help for the full list of options, which include providing a file that lists all applications to be skipped

Performance
Over the last number of releases we have been consistently improving the performance of Transformation Advisor and how it handles large datasets. We have been doing this work in conjunction with customers, who are coming up with all this complex real world data for us. Recently when working with a large government agency we discovered that the report files generated during data collection could be very large. A number of files were 80MB in size, which is quite big for a single HTML file and significantly larger than we expected.  This data could not always be loaded into Transformation Advisor as it was right on the limit of what Transformation Advisor could handle as part of it's default configuration.  TA 2.4.4 has updated it's default configuration to be able to handle these very large files and optimize storage and retrieval for them. 


What is Transformation Advisor?

Transformation Advisor (TA) is an awesome tool that guides enterprise teams through the uncertainties of migrating existing, on-premise applications to the cloud by providing recommendations on modernization changes and insight into expected complexity and development effort, it even goes as far as creating the artefacts you will need to containerize and deploy an application on cloud. If you are not already familiar with TA you can learn more by watching the episodeAccelerate Application Modernization with IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor on our IBM Expert TV channel

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