This is a significant release that contains major improvements in the way Xoom
supports newer versions of Service Optimization. The release also contains new reports and usability and
stability improvements.
Service Optimization Scheme support
Support for subtleties of Scheme in various releases of Service Optimization 8 has been
significantly improved:
- Collection sizes are now explicitly stated in the Scheme representation
taking advantage of the features introduced in Service Optimization 8.1.4. The new element is called CollectionSize and replaces CollectionIdPool, which was heuristic and only mostly reliable. (The representation of
the Scheme for SO 7.5 is unaffected by this change.)
- Identification of Scheme changes, which can actually be deployed, has
been improved. (Changes that don't make any functional difference are ignored during
deployment, as in previous versions of Xoom.)
- The stability and reliability of Scheme deployment has been improved, in
particular where it can now use reliable information about Collection size.
Other changes related to Service Optimization
Xoom Processor
- XSLT's document() functions are now supported inside
Xoom Processor, which enables a whole new type of reports where external XML documents, such as Service Optimization
reference configuration, need to be considered.
- Introduced % as an alternative to # to denote XSL transformation operation to
enable the use in shell scripting as # can denote a comment in that context.
- Xoom Processor now also supports XSL parameters. The parameters are specified on command line after
the # and before the transformation file name, using the following
syntax:
xp.exe in.xml % =:ParName1=Val1 t.xsl
As many parameters as
desired can be specified in this way, as long as they all have the required syntax and they
are all listed between the % and the XSL file.
New features
New reports for extracting settings that don't exist as their own items
(Objects) within Service Optimization. The settings are expressed using partial update commands in
Xoom, which makes the resulting file easy and safe to edit or distribute, without the danger
of overwriting other parts of the Object that holds the configuration. The
following settings are supported:
- Agent types, which are defined within the body of Agents Manager.
- Agent Instances, also defined within the body of Agents Manager.
- Rule and Objective types, the former of which is defined within the body of
Rule Types setting and the latter within the body of Objective Types setting. The
resulting document is useful as a template for distributing custom Rules and
Objectives without overwriting anything else that is defined on the target system.
Improvements
- Increased connection time-out from ten minutes to one hour to allow the deployment
of long-running configuration changes (in particular Scheme changes) to
complete without a time-out. (The time-outs don't actually invalidate the deployment,
but they do create an impression that something may be wrong when the deployment has
actually been successful.)
- In light of a longer time-out, Settings Migration Tool now reports every five minutes that the
deployment is still in progress, for as long as it actually is still in progress.
