5.3

10 vFabric Suite
10 Overview of vFabric Suite 5.3
tc Server harnesses the power of traditional JEE architectures while eliminating their complexity and performance drawbacks,
making it easier, faster, and more cost-effective to build and run cloud-ready applications. With its lean architecture and small,
10MB memory footprint, tc Server requires significantly fewer resources than conventional servers, which allows for greater
server density in virtual and cloud environments. tc Server supports integration with VMware tools and vFabric Hyperic, and
provides templates for vFabric GemFire session replication.
Main features of vFabric tc Server (Spring Edition):
• Compatible with existing Apache Tomcat applications, thus eliminating migration costs and cycles.
• Parallel deployment. Deploy multiple revisions of the same application at the same time so you can roll out a new revision of
an application without affecting users.
• Automatic instance upgrades. A script lets you easily upgrade earlier instances to function with the latest version.
• Automated deployment of applications to multiple instances of tc Server and standardized templates for rapid provisioning of
new instances.
• Commercial support for vFabric tc Server and Spring Framework.
• Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J). Included with tc Server Spring Edition, EM4J allows Java workloads to cooperate more fully
with ESXi advanced memory-sharing technologies. EM4J helps maintain Java application performance and reliability while
freeing memory so you can run more VMs per host, improving your consolidation ratio.
• Spring Insight Operations. Available with tc Server Spring Edition, Spring Insight Operations is a Web application that gives
you real-time, detailed visibility into application behavior and performance. Insight Operations is optimized for monitoring and
tuning Spring-built applications in production.
For new feature information, see vFabric tc Server Release Notes.
vFabric EM4J 1.3
Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J) revolutionizes the virtualization of Java applications.
Previously, if you ran Java on VMware ESXi, you had to reserve 100% of the configured memory for a VM running Java
applications or risk serious performance problems. To determine the optimum size of the Java heap, you determined the
application's peak requirement. Allocating less could mean unacceptable performance, errors, or crashes; allocating more than
was necessary wasted memory.
EM4J changes all that. You can run more Java applications on your ESXi servers than previously possible, and Java applications
can now effectively leverage ESXi's industry-leading memory sharing technology.
Main features of vFabric EM4J:
• Balloon that sits directly in the Java heap and works with a new memory-sharing interface introduced in ESXi 5.0. ESXi can
share available memory in the Java heap among VMs as needed, while preserving application performance and reliability.
• Ability to size the Java heap to accommodate the peak workload, without wasting or running out of memory. Any excess
memory is ballooned away and redistributed where it is needed.
• Ability to create more VMs and pack more tc Server instances onto a single vSphere host.
• Reduced possibility of out-of-memory errors that can cripple applications.
• EM4J plug-in for vSphere Web Client that lets you monitor EM4J configuration and memory performance for EM4J-enabled
Java workloads in the vSphere Web Client. View Java workload statistics for selected VMs; detailed information about JVM
process and memory usage; alerts; and suggested best practices.