message={_data_=[521 opaque bytes]}

I know that TIBCO Support experts have some tools to display and save these Rendezvous opaque bytes of AE messages, but my quick solution was to create small BusinessWorks process, which will do capture and store job. There are two activities: Rendezvous Subscriber and Write File. Rendezvous Subscriber will listen appropriate subject and has only one output complex element to represent message body. Write File has “write as binary” option and Rendezvous Subscriber’s output body is input for a file binary content. There is a formula error, but in this case it can be ignored. File name will form from Process ID to save each message in a separate file.

When this process are running, binary files will appear in the specified folder. One file per message. You can open it in your favorite binary editor/viewer and have fun!

Get the latest installer from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hermesjms/files/ then run it:
java -jar hermes-installer.jar

Installation is very simple, just few screens: release notes, license agreement, installation path, components (here is only one actually), summary, files copying, shortcuts creation and installation finish.

To start HermesJMS run hermes.bat in your <installation_folder>\HermesJMS\bin. If you got error message “cannot find \bin\javaw”, make sure that you have JAVA_HOME system variable defined to your jre folder.

When Hermes started successfully, click on “Create new JMS session” button, preferences window will appear, select providers tab and right-clik on free space. Then press “Add Group” and enter group name. Right-click on “Library” and press “Add JAR(s)”. Look in <tibco_home>\ems\5.1\lib folder and select all .jar files there. Click “Open”, then let Hermes to scan jars for factories: press “Scan” button. Then press “Apply”. All libraries will be in the list like on my screenshot.

Go to “Sessions” tab and enter name for session: “My EMS” for example, then select “EMS” loader. Next step is select “com.tibco.tibjms. TibjmsConnectionFactory” class and “Tibco EMS” plugin. Order is very important: select loader, then class, then plugin. Right-click on free space in plugin section and press “Add property”. You have to enter all three properties: username, password and serverURL, do the same for Connection Factory, then press “OK” to save and close properties window.

Now we can connect Hermes to our EMS. Let it discover queues and topics, press “Discover queues and topics from the provider” button. Then confirm replacement of the current set of destinations and list will be updated. That’s all.

If you need more information: HermesJMS home.

Task was to cross both of these things – Rendezvous based application on servers in MS NLB terminal services cluster. I’ve done some tests using different settings, but the result was an inappropriate. I received RV messages only on one server or one message on the first server, next message on second, and so on, it depend on “Filtering mode”. NLB for multicast packets works even better than I would like! But users of an application work on every server and need all messages delivered to all users on all servers.

What happens with every frame that the Network Load Balancing driver (wlbs.sys) receives is:

1. on every node wlbs.sys checks if the received packet is send to a virtual IP
2. on every node wlbs.sys checks the source IP and port
3. one node decides to accept the packet and passes it up to the TCP/IP driver
4. all other nodes drop the packet

The issue is that there is no special treatment for multicast IPs. NLB driver treats them like every other IP that is not the dedicated IP of that machine.

What are the possible solutions?

• Receive the IP multicast traffic over a NIC where no NLB is bound to. Additional NIC in every server.
• Use TCP connection to remote Rendezvous daemon (rvd). Daemon parameter in RV transport: -daemon "tcp:remotemachine:7500"
• Use local Rendezvous routing daemon (rvrd) instead of rvd. It requires rvrd on every terminal server and additional rvrd somewhere in the network.

If you would like read more, here is the list of clustering and high availability cluster resources from MS.

TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS) is fully compliant Java Message Service (JMS) implementation from TIBCO with some enterprise-class enhancements. What is it? In general, from JMS FAQ:

The Java Message Service makes it easy to write business applications that asynchronously send and receive critical business data and events.

The Java Message Service defines a common enterprise messaging API that is designed to be easily and efficiently supported by a wide range of enterprise messaging products.

The Java Message Service supports both message queuing and publish-subscribe styles of messaging (topics).

It is main part of Enterprise Backbone, Enterprise Middleware and Enterprise SOA. Unlike TIBCO Rendezvous, where publishers and subscribers communicate directly without server, EMS represent dedicated server, hub which connects all clients and passes through itself all messages.

Better to see once than hear a hundred times. Installation process for EMS server is very simple, I slightly described installation on Windows platform in this post. On Solaris or other *nix we can run installer with [-console] option if X11 isn’t configured:
bash-3.2# ./TIBCOUniversalInstaller-sol-sparc.bin -console

New TIBCO Universal Installer will store configuration files and message storages separately from binaries and allows to have multiple environments on the same host, you must specify both paths. EMS is not required any additional components like TIBCO Runtime Agent (TRA), everything is included in the archive.

To start EMS manually with output to console, just execute tibemsd or tibemsd64 (depend on platform) with option [-config] and path to tibemsd.conf file. Later in production it will run as a system service on Windows (install or remove service using emsntsrg utility) or as a daemon in Unix. Start process from console is also good for debugging purposes, if an error somewhere in the configuration files and service isn’t running.

All EMS configuration stored in the configuration files and these files are read when the EMS process going up. Main file is tibemsd.conf: it’s contain service name, listening TCP port, links to other configuration files, logging options and etc. If start EMS without specifying tibemsd.conf file, it will try to find it near binary, if unsuccessful then conf files will be created near binary with default values.

The most of EMS configuration, like new user, new queue or bridge, performed using administration tools on the live system and become active immediately, no restart required. Then changes saved in the corresponding conf files to be restored when you restart the service. But it is also possible to modify conf files manually. Moreover, some parameters, like message storages location or log file name must be predefined in conf files and EMS restart is necessary. Before each change make sure to have fresh backup of the configuration files!

For EMS administration tasks some tools are available: tibemsadmin – command line administration tool provided with EMS, EMS plugin for TIBCO Administrator, Gems (Graphical Administration Tool for EMS) by Richard Lawrence, HermesJMS. Using these tools admin can manage topics, queues, bridges, users and so on. For monitoring EMS offers many options for logging and trace. Also, admin can subscribe to system topics beginning with “$sys.monitor.” for live evens monitoring (easiest using tibemsmonitor utility).

Files used to store messages will be created on the first start using parameters in the stores.conf file (before version 5 in tibemsd.conf). In the normal operational mode, messages may accumulate in the topics and queues if no recipients – files will grow when needed, and therefore it is necessary to continuously monitor, otherwise the service may become unusable. It is possible to predefine minimal size of those files, it will take some time to build files for the first time if predefined size is large, but help to avoid fragmentation. Shrink or truncate large files to predefined minimum is also possible. When EMS restarts, all persistent messages will be recovered, but it will take some time to recover if files are large. In general, when you upgrade EMS from 4.x to 5.x, all stores will be upgraded automatically. Downgrade or rollback is also possible using tibemsdb5revert.

To provide high availability, two EMS servers can run as active-standby fault-tolerant pair. The main requirement of this configuration is the simultaneous access to store files – Cluster File System is required. Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System as expensive enterprise solution example. Some variants with network shares or NFS are also possible but guaranteed uptime and messages rate can be much lower. Alternative approach – failover cluster with shared volume.

Starting with EMS version 5 it became possible to use a database to store the messages. This simplifies the creation of fault-tolerant pair – no need to create a shared file system, enough to configure two servers to the same database. So far I haven’t collected a sufficient pro and cons, if you have such please share in the comments.

And lastly few words about connecting clients. Usually, when your application must be integrated into TIBCO middleware, means that you need communicate to EMS only. The most of SOA oriented applications are ready to communicate with JMS, Java clients can use JMS classes. TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks has JMS palletes. Applications must be able to work with the fault-tolerant pair of two servers, provide reconnection in case of connection failure, support authentication.

Useful links:

• EMS Community
• JMS Tutorial from SUN