Chapter 1. Installation for UNIX and Windows Environments

Installation Guide (Unix and Windows)

This chapter describes basic installation on fresh system, basic upgrade and advanced installation (with MySQL as the database).

Database Recommendations

As of v4.1, QFlex has been changed to utilize it’s relational database only to store client-specific configuration data.  All the realtime statistics and runtime data has been moved off relational database into blazing fast open source enterprise search platform (Apache Solr) to mainly improve performance around reporting and statistics. For this reason, it is recommended to have QFlex run it’s default database (HSQLDB). Other external databases, like MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and etc., can still be utilized instead of default database, but this will provide no additional benefits.

All the large data sets (statistics, alerts) is handled by Apache Solr engine, which is a file-based search engine.

Apache Solr

Apache Solr lives in QFLEX_HOME/bin/solr_home directory. Thus, it is important to make sure that this directory is writable and never manually changed or manipulated in any way, which might corrupt the index.

Since Solr stores all data in simple files, it is recommended to have at least 10GB+ of free disk space on the same host where QFlex is running.

Solr Upgrade

IMPORTANT: Since Qflex v4.3.0, we changed Apache Solr core to the latest version, which improves the problem of frequent index updates. The downside of this change is that Apache Solr index files from v4.3.0+ are not compatible with older versions of Qflex.

Websphere SSL Connections

Oracle has made some changes to cryptographic algorithms supported by Java JDK 1.7 and above. Several algorithms have been removed, which created issues with Queue Manager SSL connectivity when using Oracle JDK.

Please see this forum thread for more information: http://www.capitalware.com/rl_blog/?p=3074

So far, the only way we managed to get SSL working was by using IBM’s JDK or JRE 1.8