"Before you can race, you must qualify". As a fan of Motorsports (Formula 1 in particular) I hear this phrase on many weekends throughout the season. The phrase basically means that to have the highest chance of being successful in an endeavor you must prepare adequately. In this article I shall take this same idea and show you how to apply it to a successful Maximo installation.
If "qualifying" is preparing for a race then careful planning of your IBM Maximo Administrative Workstation is along the same lines. Many of us that have successfully installed Maximo 7.5 know that the installation of the the Admin Workstation is of critical importance for a successful installation of Maximo and it's dependent Middleware.
When you are planning for the installation of your Administrative Workstation, whether it is on a physical or virtual machine, a few important system characteristics can be considered that will impact the performance of your Admin Workstation and therefore the time it takes to successfully install and deploy Maximo.
First and foremost let us identify the two critical performance aspects of the Admin Workstation: network performance and local disk throughput.
Network performance of the Admin Workstation comes into play during the maxinst/updatedb operations as well as the deployment of the Maximo and Help EAR files. For best performance during these operations it is critical to ensure that you locate the Admin Workstation in the same LAN as the target J2EE and Database servers that will be used to host your Maximo instance.
Local disk throughput is another key component that you must consider for your Admin Workstation. The building of the Maximo and Help EAR files is very disk intensive and factors such as real-time AntiVirus protection can substantially extend the amount of time it takes to build these EAR files. My own experience has been that disabling the real-time AntiVirus protection can shorten the time it takes to build the maximo.ear file from 12 minutes down to 4 minutes, which is a substantial time savings.
Another factor to consider if your Admin Workstation is to be a virtual machine is the importance of "snapshots". Although snapshots do not affect deployment or installation performance they are critical for recovery purposes should you ever need to go back to a particular point in time. We often take snapshots once the base Operating System is installed and patched accordingly, and then take subsequent snapshots after the IBM installation files have been downloaded and extracted, etc. A few snapshots taken at appropriate times can save you many hours of rebuild work later should the need arise.