Application Configuration

The Application Configuration property sheet allows you to configure the settings of the application as a whole. If you look at the entire application as a single appliance, these are its instance settings.

For a well-built application, these settings are the only configuration that you need to change when starting a new instance of the application (e.g., you will need to do that if you have made a copy of the application or you have moved the application from another AppLogic system).

In addition to the application settings, this property sheet contains some additional elements, such as the application management panel and the protocols settings.

You can reach the Application Configuration property sheet in the following ways:

• from the dashboard, select the Applications tab, select the application you want to configure and press the Configure application button at the top of the applications list
• from the dashboard, select the Applications tab, select the application you want to configure, open the right-click menu for the application and select the Configure option
• from inside the editor, open the right-click menu on the canvas and select the Configure Application option or click on the Application menu item and select the Configure option.

The application configuration is structured in the following sections (tabs):

This property sheet is very similar to the Instance Settings property sheet, except it affects the settings of the application as a whole.

General

Name

Unique name of the application on this grid.
A icon may be shown to the right of the application name designating that the application is locked. When an application is locked, it may not be edited or viewed within the Editor. See Application and Class Locking Reference for more information.

Description

Human-readable description of the application.

User 1

Free-form user-defined text intended for specifying billing code.

User 2

Free-form user-defined text intended for specifying billing code.

Template

check box specifying that application is a template (i.e., it may be provisioned)

Unique ID

Unique numeric identifier of the application used internally by AppLogic. It is assigned automatically when the application is created.

Documentation URL

URL where the documentation for the application can be found. The URL may be opened by clicking on the Open URL text to the right of the field.

Although you cannot change the application name here, you can rename the application from the Installed Applications screen.

Comments and questions

Resources

The Resources tab allows you to control how much resources the application requires and will be allowed to take.

By default, AppLogic calculates the resource range of the application based on the resource ranges of all appliances used in the application.

If you don't want to constrain the application further or simply don't know yet what constraints you want, leave the default settings (uncheck all constraints).

AppLogic provides two ways to constrain further the amount of resources to be allocated to the application: by number of servers or by resource range.

In addition, you can select a subset of servers in the system, on which the application can be scheduled. Such constraints allow you to specialize this particular instance of the application for production and sandbox (testing) environments.

AppLogic determines the actual amount of resources to be given to an application when you start the application. Whatever resources are available and/or specified when starting the application must fit within the range defined here. See Starting Applications for more details.

You can fix the exact amount of resources to be used when starting the application by specifying the maximum values equal to the minimum. This will ensure that (a) no freedom will be given to the AppLogic scheduler, (b) the application will not start unless at least that much resources are available, and (c) the application will take no more than that much resources.

On this screen you can only reduce the resource range: specify a higher minimum and/or lower maximum for resources.

Limit the resource range - Constrain by Resources

Specify the resource range for each hardware resource separately (CPU, memory and bandwidth).

The following resource types can be specified:

CPU

Portion of CPU or number of CPUs to be allocated for the application. Fractional amounts can be specified as a decimal number (e.g., 0.5 or 3.5). Whole CPUs are specified simply as an integer (e.g., 12).

Memory

Amount of memory to be allocated for the application. The amount can be specified as an integer value in Megabytes (e.g., 512M) or in Gigabytes (e.g., 9G).

Bandwidth

Amount of network bandwidth to be allocated for this application (total for all terminals/interfaces, including the internal communication inside the application). The amount can be specified as an integer value in Megabits/sec (e.g., 10M) or in Gigabits/sec (e.g., 1G).
See here for an important note regarding resource oversubscription of network bandwidth.

A range can be specified for each resource type. The range defines the normal operating parameters desired for the application in production environment.

Minimum

The minimum amount of a resource that the application needs to work at all. This is useful to allow running the application in functional testing environments, where the application is not expected to run under production load, and therefore can run with much less resources. Contrast this with the Defauilt below, which is amount of resources needed for production use.

Maximum

The maximum amount of a resource that the application will be allowed to take. Typically this is the maximum that the application can use (i.e., giving it more resources will not increase performance). The application will not be allocated more than the specified maximum amount, ensuring that it will not be able to take resources away from other applications -- think of it as a quota.

Default

The minimum amount of a resource that the application should be provided with for normal operation in production environments. The application will not be started unless at least that much can be allocated for it. Specifying a default ensures that the application will work within certain "guaranteed" resource amount -- think of it as a service level agreement (SLA) for that resource.

You can easily see which values override the defaults -- they are displayed in bold. If you want to restore the default value for a given resource, use the restore button next to the value.

Limit the set of servers - Constrain by Server Names

You can also select on which particular servers of the system you would like the application to run.

The list of servers on your system can be found by executing the server list shell command.

This is an advanced option that may be useful when you want to run several applications on the same system and the results produced by the AppLogic scheduler are not satisfactory. In most cases you should leave this constraint disabled.

Comments and questions

User Volumes

The User Volumes tab allows you to configure volumes for the application instance. Many applications don't have any configurable volumes (all application volumes are assigned internally in the application), so there would be nothing to configure.

Being able to configure volumes on the application is useful in the cases when the application has more than one actual volume for a given volume need. For example, an e-commerce application may have a test database and a production database volumes. In this case, the User Volumes tab allow you to specify which actual volume you want to configure as the database volume.

If you want to add or remove actual application volumes or access one of the application volumes in order to upload and/or download files to/from it, press the Manage Volumes button.

If you want to add or remove placeholder application volumes (volume roles), close this property sheet and edit the application boundary by right-clicking on the editor canvas and selecting Edit Application Boundary from the menu. See Class Editor for details.

The info button next to the volume (if present) gives you information about the volume requirements (e.g., read-only, shared, etc.).

Comments and questions

Properties

The Properties tab allows you to set values for properties of the application, allowing you to specialize this instance of the application. This is useful for configuring location-specific parameters, such as IP addresses, and for configuring tuning parameters, such as cache sizes.

The default values of the properties are shown in normal font weight. Property values explicitly configured for this application are in bold.

For information on the property, its type and allowed values, select the info button . To restore the default value of a property, press the restore button (use the "Reset All" button to reset the values of all properties to their defaults).

If you want to add or remove application properties, close this property sheet and edit the application boundary by right-clicking on the editor canvas and selecting Edit Class from the menu. See Class Editor for details.

Comments and questions

Protocols

The Protocols tab shows the full set of protocols available for defining appliance terminal types. This is not a configurable application settings (i.e., it is not something that you may want to change from one instance of the application to another), but rather an advanced option for configuring appliances in the application scope (Protocols are on a separate tab for convenience, although they belong to the application configuration and should be part of the application boundary property sheet).

This is useful when you are defining new appliances and want to know what protocol types are available, or want to add new protocols.

Catalog Protocols

This list shows the protocols defined in all catalogs accessible to the application (union of all protocols defined in all catalogs, with the duplicates eliminated).

Name

The name of the protocol. This name is used when selecting a protocol for each terminal of an appliance inside the application.

Filter

A network filter specification for the protocol, describing what are the legal interactions. The descriptions are similar to setting up port filters.

This list is read-only. To add a new protocol, use the Application Protocols list below.

Application Protocols

This list defines the custom protocols specific to the application.

You can add new protocols, defining the same parameters as for the catalog protocols list above.

Name

The name of the protocol. This name is used when selecting a protocol for each terminal of an appliance inside the application; it must be unique (should be a duplicate of a catalog-defined protocol). The name is a single word, case-sensitive, alphanumeric ([A-Za-z0-9_]).

Filter

A network filter specification for the protocol, describing what are legal interactions in that protocol. Currently, the filter specification for AppLogic is not fully defined. Please use the following format for the filter value: # protocol identification or comment. The comment should be sufficient to identify the application-level protocol (such as an RFC number) or simply a description (# TCP port 80).

The any protocol allows connections to be established in any direction within a connection (a bi-directional connection). The any protocol must be set on both terminals of the connection.

Even though this version of AppLogic does not enforce the protocols on inter-appliance connections, it is a good idea to set those correctly, both for documenting the required protocol and for making use of the protocol enforcement feature when it becomes available.

You can add new protocols only for singleton appliances; if you add the appliance using the new protocol(s) to a catalog, the protocol settings may not be propagated properly. If you need to add new protocols, contact Technical Support for more details and/or review the protocol definitions in catalog packages described in the ADL Language Reference.

Comments and questions

Notes

The notes tab shows free-form notes that are set on the application. You can edit the notes by double clicking on the text window.

The Note editor/viewer is based upon TinyMCE, a platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control released as Open Source under LGPL by Moxiecode Systems AB.

The following text formatting options are available from the toolbar:

Bold

Bold text that is selected or text to be typed.

Italicize

Italicize text that is selected or text to be typed.

Ordered List

Create numbered list.

Unordered List

Create unordered bulleted list.

Insert/edit Link

Insert or modify a hyper link. To insert a hyper link, type and highlight the text that is to comprise the hyper link and then click on the Insert/edit Link button. A dialog is displayed where you can enter the URL to which the link is to refer as well as optional text This option is also available from the right-click menu.

Unlink

Remove a hyper link leaving the text. This option is also available from the right-click menu.

-- BeckyH - 26 May 2006