Deploy Maximo 7.6.1 on Websphere 8.5

Out of curiosity, I installed Maximo 7.6.1 on a VM to explore the new features. Then I found that I kind of like it, so I wanted to deploy it on my host OS to get rid of the VM. The trouble is I have Websphere 8.5.5.3 which comes with Maximo 7.6.0.0. I can run maxinst.bat to create demo data with Oracle 11g without a hiccup, but the deployment of the EAR file to Websphere didn’t go well.

It turned out Maximo 7.6.1 requires Java 1.8 and Websphere 9. It’s not possible to upgrade Websphere from version 8 to 9. We will have to install a new Websphere environment and migrate all of the settings which sounds like a lot of work. I decided to tweak it a little bit to make Maximo 7.6.1 runs on Websphere 8.5 using the following process:

1 – Update Installation Manager: Open IM, then open File > Preference, on the left menu, choose Update, check the Search for Installation Manager updates. Then click Ok. Then back to the main Installation Manager screen, click on “Install”, a wizard will pop up to download and update Installation Manager to the latest version (I got 1.8.9 by the time of writing this)

2 – Update Webshere: Open IM after it is updated, click on Update, choose Websphere Application Server 8.5, then follow the wizard. It will download and update Websphere with the latest fix packs. (I got 8.5.5.13)

3 – Install JDK 1.8: Open IM again, choose Install, then select ‘IBM SDK Java version 8’ to install it to the existing Websphere. After that, I got both Java 1.7 and Java 1.8 in my Websphere folder:

4 – Switch SDK version in Websphere: I used the [WAS_home]/bin/managesdk.cmd tool to change Websphere to use SDK 1.8 following the instruction here. To verify that MXServer uses the correct SDK version, I started MXServer and look at the SystemOut.log file to see the startup log:

5 – Upgrade deploytool: After the above step, I tried to deploy maximo.ear file and it failed. Turned out that the deployment tool of Websphere 8.5 doesn’t work with this new Maximo version. So I cheated by replacing the ‘deploytool’ folder of my Websphere 8.5 environment with the ‘deploytool’ folder I copied from the Websphere 9 environment I got when installing a fresh Maximo 7.6.1 instance in my VM. After that, the deployment process ran without any issues (and it is super fast compared to the previous version, yay!)

6 – Add new JMS queues: after maximo.ear is deployed, I tried to start MXServer but it failed, turned out there are new queues added to Maximo 7.6.1 which are not there with my existing Websphere environment, so I have to manually add those new queues and activation specifications to Websphere.

In summary for this step, I had to add new queues and activation specifications to Websphere. I basically mimic the settings from the Websphere environment I got in my VM. In the end, I added two queues: NOTF and NOTFERR, and two activation specifications: notfact, and notfacterr. Since I use Websphere MQ, I have to added two bus destinations in Websphere MQ as well. If you use the standard WAS default messaging provider, you simply add the two destinations to the ‘intjmsbus‘. I struggled with this step a little bit as the name of these artefacts are case-sensitive but I didn’t pay attention the first time I created those.

After this step, MXServer starts up without any issue and it works like a charm.