Server Configuration Management Best Practice

[jamesbo]

Background:

We use JBoss 4.2.2 with JBossMessaging and Clustering. In production we have one instance per server node (minimum two nodes) and in development run two servers on same box using Service Bindings (http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/ConfiguringMultipleJBossInstancesOnOneMachine).

As expected we have added and/or modified files in the conf, deploy and lib dirs to meet our deployment and configuration requirements and will probably tune further in accordance with http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/JBossASTuningSliming.

We don't use the farm service as hot deployment is not a priority and the farm service has a few gotchas anyway.

Question:

Given the above, what is the recommended approach for managing and sharing server configurations?

The difference between development and production is minimal (enablement of Service Bindings and two copies of the server directory) so developers can look after that themselves. However the core configuration and deployment stuff needs to be highly automated and repeatable.

Main options seem to be scripting or to place a copy of the server directory in a version control tool (e.g Subversion). I'm leaning towards the latter as it has built in version management and is very easy to do. An export from Subversion is all that would then be required to configure a server plus dropping the latest build of EARs etc into the deploy directory. Is that what others are doing?

Thanks, James.

[itsme]

Yeap, the latter one.

As I remember there was an option to start jboss right by downloading itself from an (remote) repository (i.e. subversion), but I can't remember that option.
All I know is that we did it ones two or three years ago. I would recommend to investigate in that direction.

/sandor/

[dimitris]

I've seen both methods in use. Very large sites seems to prefer a templating approach, while smaller ones are happy putting their configs under version control.