Before Installing Geronimo

Ensure that you have met all the hardware and software requirements before you install Geronimo. This section can help you to plan your systems for wide deployment of Geronimo.

Hardware Platform Requirements

Geronimo has been tested and runs well on any x86 platform. From our experience, you should really have a processor with speed of 2 GHz and above for serious production deployment. Being a Java-based server, you are not tied to x86 processors. Geronimo has been tested on PowerPC (Mac OS), Sparc (SUN Solaris), as well as PA-RISC (HP-UX) processors.

Important

As with all J2EE 1.4–compatible servers, the compatibility testing is performed on a highly version-specific software stack (that is, a certain operating system release level with certain Java VM release level, and so on). If you are required to run only on 100 percent J2EE 1.4 certified platform, you must duplicate the certified stack and acquire your hardware based on it. See the following URL for more information on J2EE 1.4 compatibility: http://java.sun.com/j2ee/compatibility_1.4.html

A basic Geronimo configuration (such as the Little-G servers) can be started on systems with as little as 256MB of RAM. To get reasonable performance, it is recommended that you start your production Geronimo server at 1GB of RAM.

Needless to say, you will need a network connection on the server machine. Adapters for gigabits, 100 Mbps, or even 10 Mbps will work fine for most Geronimo configurations.

JVM Requirement

In general, you will require Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.4.2 to successfully run Geronimo. More particularly, you will need SUN’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to run release 1.1 of Geronimo if you need to support Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). This restriction is because of some internal dependency of this release of Geronimo on the Object Request Broker (ORB) included with SUN’s JDK.

To eliminate the stranglehold of the non–Open Source ORB, veterans from the original Geronimo team are busy working with on the Yoko project in the Apache incubator (the stage of development when startup Open Source projects go through initial incubation). The Yoko project aims to create a complete standards-compliant, Open Source CORBA ORB. When the ORB is finished, it will be integrated in Geronimo - eliminating the need for SUN’s JDK. You can find out a lot more about the Yoko project at its own Apache project page:

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/yoko.html

If you do not use any CORBA features, you can run Geronimo on non–SUN JDK 1.5, as well as any compatible version of JDK 5.

Throughout this book, it is assumed that you are running Geronimo with the latest available release of JDK 1.4.2 or JDK 5. For the CORBA configuration and support example in Chapter 14, you are required to run under SUN’s JDK 1.4.2. If you do not already have SUN’s JDK 1.4.2 installed on your system, you can download it from the following URL:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html

The latest version (as of this writing) is 1.4.2_12, and has been tested to fully support Geronimo.

Important

If you are using Mac OSX, the latest Apple JVM 1.4.2 version on OSX should support Geronimo.

As a reminder, you can always find out what version of the Java VM you have installed using the following command at the console:

 java -version