You probably know already that
WebSphere Liberty is a lightweight composable application server that is fully production ready for both on-premises workloads and cloud deployments. But, have you ever wondered whether the enterprise applications that you currently develop or administer in traditional WebSphere Application Server are ready to run on Liberty? You can now find the answer right from within your WebSphere administrative console. New functionality analyzes your enterprise applications, identifies potential issues that might need to be addressed, provides guidance for updating your apps for running on WebSphere Liberty, and produces a feature list for the Liberty server.xml configuration file to get you started.
If you are considering moving to the Cloud, then the recommended tool is IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor because it provides important planning information, includes more comprehensive application and configuration analyses, as well as generates customized assets and recommendations for cloud environments. However, if you are just looking to take the first step towards modernization by moving to WebSphere Liberty, then the new functionality added to the Integrated Solutions Console (i.e., admin console) of traditional WebSphere Application Server v9.0 fixpack 11 and v8.5.5 fixpack 16 can quickly get you started.
Get a quick overview of the new functionality in this Analyze Your Enterprise Applications video. To get some hands-on experience performing a Liberty analysis within the admin console, check out this IBM Cloud Garage DTE guided demonstration of the functionality.
How to use the new WebSphere Enterprise Application analyze functions
After logging in to the admin console, navigate to your WebSphere enterprise applications, where you will find a new Analyze button with the following options: Run scanner, Configure scanner, Delete report and About Liberty. To begin, simple select one or more of the applications that are available in the Enterprise Applications collection. Then go to the Analyze button and select Run scanner. At that point, a scan request will be submitted to analyze the selected applications for migration readiness to WebSphere Liberty. Upon completion of the scan, a summary of the results is displayed. Applications that are ready to move to Liberty are tagged with a green icon with a checkmark. Applications that might need attention before moving to Liberty are flagged with one or more other icons. When the scanner detects APIs that are not available in Liberty or there are behavioral changes that can break an application, they are labeled severe issues and flagged with a red circular icon with a backslash mark. If the scanner detects APIs or behavioral changes that needs further evaluation because they might break an application, they are labeled warnings and flagged with a yellow triangular icon with an exclamation mark. Deprecated APIs or minor behavioral changes that should not affect most applications are labeled informational and flagged with a blue square icon with a lowercase i.
Viewing the Application Migration Report
Details of the analysis are available in the Application Migration Report. Click the Report link to view the report in the admin console. Here you may click the Save Report button at the top of the report to download a copy to the machine from which you are accessing the admin console. This is helpful for reviewing offline or sharing the results with a developer or team mate.
There are three parts to the migration report. The first part is the Technology Evaluation Summary, which indicates which IBM Platforms are a good fit with the technologies used by the application. The second part is a Migration Rule Severity Summary that shows how many rules were flagged and the number of times each was encountered. The last part is the Application Migration Details which is divided into four sections. The first section, Technology Evaluation, provides a table of the technologies detected and matching IBM platforms. Technologies that are not supported are linked to analysis rules listed in the second section, the Detailed Migration Analysis, where all the flagged rules are listed along with rule specific help information. The Detailed Migration Analysis even identifies the file names and line numbers where the rule infractions were detected. The Inventory section, provides a high-level view of the content and structure of the application. The final section, the Liberty Feature List, contains a list of all the required features for the application in the Liberty server.xml configuration file.
Configuring the application scanner
The application scanner can be configured to include and exclude specific packages from its analyses. Select the Configure scanner… option under the
Analyze button to access the configuration panel. When package names are provided in the include packages field, only those specific packages will be included in the analysis. The scanner is preconfigured to exclude Java EE and some third party packages from its analyses by default, which you can edit for your particular situation. Additionally, you can select the target version of Java SE that you expect to use as the runtime for WebSphere Liberty. The default is set to IBM Java 8, but options are also available for IBM Java 7, Oracle Java 7 or 8, and OpenJDK11 with Eclipse OpenJ9 or Hotspot. It is important to note here that
support for running Liberty with Java SE 7 will end after September 2019.
Deleting Application Migration Reports
Migration reports can be deleted by selecting one or more applications from the enterprise applications collection and then choosing the Delete report option under the
Analyze button. Additionally, when applications are uninstalled or redeployed, the migration reports for those application automatically get deleted. This is done to avoid there being a mismatch between the information contained in a migration report and the version of the application that is available in the admin console.
What to do after analyzing your enterprise applications
For applications that have a green checkmark and are ready for Liberty, go ahead and try running them on either Open Liberty or WebSphere Liberty. Alternatively, you can use Transformation Advisor to start planning the migration of the applications to WebSphere Liberty, moving them into containers, and even deploying to either IBM Cloud or IBM Cloud Private. Transformation Advisor helps by generating some of the necessary artifacts such as Liberty server.xml file with a features list and some migrated configuration information, Docker files for containerization, as well as Helm chart and deployment.yaml for Kubernetes deployment.
For applications that need to be updated before moving to Liberty and you have the source code available, add the WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit to your Eclipse development environment. This toolkit analyzes application source code and generates the same report as those in the admin console but does so from within your Eclipse IDE so that changes can be made quickly and easily. WebSphere Liberty can be run directly from within the Eclipse IDE too, making it all that much easier to verify that your application runs as expected.
