[jboss-as7-dev] AS7 testsuite extension

[Brian Stansberry]

On 7/22/11 2:34 AM, Rostislav Svoboda wrote:

<snip/>

>>>>
>>>>> ARQ with DC support is needed, start/stop/kill support for
>>>>> instances
>>>>> managed by DC is needed too (ARQ-336 is designed for standalone),
>>>>> maybe start/stop/kill for DC will be required too.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I regard that as a nice to have, not a requirement. HA
>>>> functionality
>>>> is
>>>> orthogonal to how the servers are managed; a testsuite of Paul's HA
>>>> features based on launching multiple standalone servers is ok. The
>>>> actual HA services inside the servers have no clue whether they are
>>>> running in a standalone server or a managed domain.
>>>
>>> OK, I agree with that, DC is only about server management, no effect
>>> on AS7 functionality. My point about ARQ with DC support is more
>>> about message to users, we really recommend to use DC, but we don't
>>> use it in our tests ...
>>
>> I agree with the message to users point, but I just want to emphasize
>> we
>> have limited time and a large number of hard requirements and AFAIK
>> this
>> is not one of them. So always be cautious about adding new
>> requirements,
>> particularly ones that become blockers earlier in the process.
>>
>> We have a nice testing story already with AS 7 and Arquillian. And
>> it's
>> improving rapidly. So if support for using a managed domain is on the
>> roadmap but doesn't get in AS 7.1 or comes in too late to be the basis
>> of our HA testsuite, I don't think that's too bad of a message.
>
> ARQ without DC support is not blocker for us in this case, we can do majority of clustering/HA testing with several standalone servers.
> For complicated tests we wanted to use DC for simpler control of the cluster. There is motivation to keep everything Java based and located in one testsuite. We have other tools like SmartFrog (SF) which we use for HA testing but we planned to drop SF usage for AS7 tests. It's not easy to develop components and test templates, debugging is really painful. Maintenance of SF tests and components is resource consuming, not speaking about learning curve. That's our main motivation for ARQ with DC support.
>

I certainly don't object to using the DC for this kind of stuff. :-) 
That is what it's for.

Keep in mind that the DC can't be used to hard kill servers; it only 
exposes operations for controlled shutdown. I know that one of the 
things the QE smartfrog stuff does in some HA tests is hard kill servers.


-- 
Brian Stansberry
Principal Software Engineer
JBoss by Red Hat