1. Compelling Events for Automation
• Middleware Upgrades It’s great when new vendors
bring out new features - but often taking advantage of
them takes a good deal of time and effort to upgrade
the new infrastructure - and introduces risk. Automating
the upgrade project speeds it up, reduces the risk and
builds a more manageable platform in the future.
• Migrating off ‘Premium Product’ With the economy
as it is, more organizations are forced to tighten their
belts, and one area that has come under particular
scrutiny is the annual cost of maintaining installed
software. Some organizations have made the decision
to move less business critical applications off more
expensive middleware onto open-source platforms
such as JBoss and Tomcat. This type of project is
accelerated when it’s automated and an automation
tool makes managing hybrid or heterogeneous
environments much easier.
• Building a PAAS or a private cloud With pressure
on businesses to deliver more innovation to their
customers, faster, we see many of our customers
building Platforms As A Service and private clouds.
These are a lot faster and quicker to set up using an
automation tool, and a lot quicker to manage demand
once they are up and running.
• Core business application upgrades or migrations
Many of our customers occasionally need to upgrade
or even replace their core business applications - often
complex, multi-layered, integrated systems that have
evolved over time and have many integration points
and are absolutely critical to the minute by minute
operations of the business. Using an automation tool
can reduce the risk and time associated with such
a project.
• Platform migrations Sometimes it’s time to move
from one platform to another - for instance, customers
sometimes feel that a UNIX based platform will
offer them performance advantages over an OS400
platform. But moving hundreds of middleware
applications might seem like a challenge too far -
without automation.
Folder Management Insights
• Managing folder structures and files on target
servers, for example configuration files under a
“conf” folder, can be time consuming and prone
to error. It is often a manual task and changes in
a development environment, when “promoted”
to production often means trying to make the
same changes in production that you made
in development, perhaps with some unique
“production only” settings or variables. Often,
you’ll need to get the developer who made the
changes in development, along with the production
operator, to go through and change the files. There
is enormous scope for something to be missed,
mis-typed or configured wrongly.
• This plugin allows you to manage folders on target
servers centrally in a configuration management
tool. You can snapshot a (Development or
“Golden”) folder structure, by giving the top level
directory path and a set of filesets to include/
exclude for both configuration and binary files. This
snapshot set of files can be compared over time
(comparison of checksums for the binary filesets)
to determine configuration drift.
• The filesets can be templated and parameterised,
using environment specific data dictionary files and
stored in the SCM tool on the framework server,
managed centrally. The template folder structure
in SCM can be packaged up for deployment to
other targets, thus enabling filesystem files to be
configuration managed and deployed out to target
servers just as you would for code.
RapidDeploy™ Plugin for Folder Management
RapidDeploy™ provides organizations with Application Release Automation capabilities
to reduce costs, improve productivity and time to value and assure compliance. There
is a range of plugins available to extend the core automation framework capabilities to
most available platforms and perform integrations throughout the DevOps toolchain.
This datasheet refers to the Folder Management plugin.
Plugins are downloaded through the Plugin Manager console in RapidDeploy™, or from the MidVision
website at www.midvision.com.
RapidDeploy™TargetPlugin

2. • Rearchitecting Change is a constant and businesses
need to continually evolve their IT infrastructure
and operations, build new environments for things
like Disaster Recovery and automating the build
and deployment of these new environments means
delivering them faster.
Folder Management Plugin Overview
The RapidDeply™ Folder Management plugin allows
a target filesystem, folder or set of files to be managed
by RapidDeploy™. You can snapshot a folder, selecting
file patterns to include and exclude. These files can
be tokenised and stored in an software configuration
management tool. The filesystem can then be pushed
out to other machines and machine specific replacement
parameters used to “customise” the filesystem on the
target machine.
If you use software that is not listed here and you
would like to manage it using RapidDeploy™ please
email sales@midvision.com with the details. For
future versions, we aim to have support within two
quarters of the vendor announcing general availability,
although customer demand can accelerate our
development roadmap.
RapidDeploy™ Plugins
The RapidDeploy™ plugins extend the functionality of
the core automation framework and are categorised in
the following way:
• Toolchain plugins enabling integration with Build
Engines, Artifact repositories and Source Control
Management tools
• Transport plugins enabling use of SSH and
Agent capability
• Target plugins enabling connectivity with broad
range of Middleware Applications and Databases
• Cloud plugins enabling connectivity to cloud providers
• Business Intelligence plugins to extend the
CAF including for example, enhanced comparison
functionality and additional reporting capabilities
Plugins ship with:
• A Library of commonly used tasks
• Wizards extensive help information
• Predefined automation library elements
Want this plugin? Getting hold of it’s easy - either:
1) Go to the Plugin Manager in your installation of RapidDeploy™ and pick your plugin from the list or
2) Go to www.midvision.com Support Downloads RapidDeploy Plugin Downloads and select your
plugin from there. If you have any problems, please call or email your MidVision Account Manager.
You must license your plugin separately - please speak to your MidVision Account Manager
or email sales@midvision.com. If you are an IBM Rational Automation Framework customer and
would like access to this plugin, please contact us at www.midvision.com.
www.midvision.com©MidVision2013.Allrightsreserved.RapidDeploy™TargetPlugin