Ensemble News, Alerts, and Advisories

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November 13, 2007 - Ensemble 2007.1 HL7 FTP Outbound Adapter

InterSystems has discovered a deficiency in one of the stream classes for HL7. This error causes problems when sending messages using the Ensemble HL7 FTP Outbound Adapter.  The stream class incorrectly performs a flush on the stream which results in the message contents being truncated.

The bug has been fixed in Ensemble 2008.1 and a patch is available from the InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC). Should you need the fix, please contact the InterSystems WRC and reference ad hoc #6126 to expedite the process.

October 26, 2007 – Advisory:  Solaris Defect Impacts Caché/Ensemble Installation

InterSystems has discovered that a defect in Solaris 10 can potentially cause serious damage to the file system containing the Caché/Ensemble files.  The defect is related to the implementation of chown/chmod. 

This risk exists for all currently released distributions of Caché and Ensemble when installed on Solaris 10.  The risk exists for both SPARC and x86 platforms.

Caché and Ensemble are at risk of triggering this Solaris defect only during installation, specifically during execution of cinstall.

The damage done is that chown/chmod will traverse up to the root filesystem changing ownership/permissions on all files.  Please see the Solaris patch documentation for more information.  It has also been observed that this will cause the Caché/Ensemble install process to take significantly longer to complete due to the amount of time for chown/chmod to process all the files.

Corrections for this defect are available from Sun Microsystems:

          Solaris 10 (SPARC):
                    Kernel level          118833-36 or later 
                    Patch            125499-01

          Solaris 10 (x86)
                    Kernel level          118855-36 or later
                    Patch            125500-01 

InterSystems recommends that the appropriate Kernel and Patch be applied to your system(s) before installing Caché or Ensemble.

It is also possible to work around this defect by replacing the default Solaris’ version of chmod/chown with the GNU version.

If you have any questions regarding this, please contact the InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC).

June 11, 2007 - Caché and Ensemble on Microsoft Vista Update

Several months ago we announced our plans for Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system. In essence, our plan was to fully support Vista with Caché and Ensemble 2007.2 versions and to document some workarounds that would enable customers to begin working with Caché 2007.1 on Vista. What we have learned in the ensuing months has caused us to change our plan to the following:

  • We will produce a Caché 2007.1.1 version that fully supports Vista for new installations for Microsoft Vista Business and Microsoft Vista Ultimate as a server platform, and all editions for Microsoft Vista as a client platform. It will not support upgrades of prior Caché versions that were installed on prior Windows versions.

  • We plan to make a field test version of Caché 2007.1.1 for Vista available by Wednesday, June 13. Assuming that we get quick feedback from at least a few test sites and that no major problems are found, we will release 2007.1.1 two to three weeks later, i.e. in late June or early July. If you would like to participate in evaluating the upcoming Caché 2007.1.1 for Vista, please send contact information to Andreas Dieckow. Note that terminal server capabilities are not supported with version 2007.1.1 for Vista.

  • We also plan to release an Ensemble 2007.1.x version with Vista support in the near future.

  • We recognize that other issues will likely surface as Vista usage grows and we will address these in 2007.2 and future versions. We will also continue to investigate the Windows version upgrade issue.

  • The following features are not supported on Vista: DDP and LAT.

  • Microsoft Windows Vista is not supported with versions of Caché and Ensemble prior to 2007.1.

June 6, 2007 – Caché and Ensemble Routine Corruption with Large Routines

InterSystems has corrected a Caché defect that can lead to run time errors in instances with routines larger than 32k.  It is strongly recommended that the correction for this defect be installed as soon as possible in any environment at risk for this defect.

This defect exists in Caché 5.1 through 5.2.x and all Ensemble 4.0.x distributions.  The defect is present on all platforms and operating systems.

Symptoms are unpredictable but can include process failure and Caché errors such as <CLASS DOES NOT EXIST>.  The symptoms of this defect only appear at execution time.  No messages or errors will appear during routine compilation.

Necessary conditions for this defect to be triggered are Caché routine buffers configured to greater than 32k and routines that compile to greater than 32k object code size.  Once these conditions are met the symptoms may appear in any routine in the environment and are not limited to only the routines larger than 32k.

The correction for this defect, identified as CDS948, is included in the upcoming Caché 2007.1 and Ensemble 2007 based releases.  The correction is also available from InterSystems in an Ad Hoc distribution.

If you have questions please contact InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC).

April 19, 2007 - Caché and Ensemble on Microsoft Vista

This announcement has been replaced by the June 11, 2007 announcement.

 

April 5, 2007 – Advisory: Caché and Ensemble on 64-bit Microsoft Windows

InterSystems has discovered an issue with Windows memory management that has important implications with the larger Caché buffer pools possible on 64-bit Windows platforms.  The issue is that memory requirements on Windows platforms are larger than on similarly configured UNIX Platforms.

Large buffer pools (i.e. large shared memory segments) require that each Caché or Ensemble process set aside a significant amount of private memory for internal use by Windows (called Page Table Entries or PTEs).  On 64-bit Windows, where very large buffer pools can be defined, the cumulative effect can be considerable.  To ensure good performance sufficient physical memory must be available - paging of the PTEs can lead to very poor performance,

For example, a 16GB shared memory section will require 32MB per process of Windows internal memory management tables. Thus 1000 processes will require 32GB of memory just for page table entries.

InterSystems can assist with calculating memory requirements for customers considering a 64-bit Windows platform.

If you have questions please contact InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC).

March 11, 2007 – InterSystems Products and VMware Virtualization Software

InterSystems has determined in benchmark and customer testing that VMware environments running Caché and Ensemble require significantly greater CPU capacity than native installations on the same hardware.  In multi-user tests, CPU load is typically twice as great (200%) of the same tests run on the same operating system natively (i.e. without VMware) on the same hardware.  Additionally, there are application specific implications for response time for interactive jobs.

InterSystems, along with a number of its customers, have reported this problem to VMware and VMware is investigating.  For updates on the status, please contact VMware Global Alliance team.

This affects all versions of all InterSystems products.  Until a solution is available from VMware, InterSystems recommends that any customers contemplating a VMware deployment

  • Ensure that available CPU capacity is at least twice as large as a native installation and
  • Conduct application specific testing to ascertain what, if any, response time impact will be noticed by users.

Please contact InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC)  before deploying Caché or Ensemble on VMware.

March 6, 2007 – Caché, Ensemble and Microsoft Vista

InterSystems testing has revealed a number of issues that prevent installation and operation of existing Caché and Ensemble versions on Microsoft Vista.  Many of these are related to new operating system security features.  Based on what we have discovered to date -- and we need to keep in mind that more issues may yet surface -- our plan is as follows:

  1. The 2007.2 versions of Caché and Ensemble will fully support Microsoft Vista for both server and client configurations.
  2. It is possible that the 2007.1 versions of Caché and Ensemble will run on Vista with certain limitations and some manual "work arounds".  For instance, Vista introduces a new version of Microsoft's IIS Web server which drops support for the mechanism (called ISAPI) which is used to connect CSP to IIS.  The work around is to manually re-enable ISAPI support in IIS.  (Alternatively, customers may decide to use Apache instead of IIS.)  In 2007.2 we will move to a new IIS connection mechanism for CSP.
  3. Caché and Ensemble versions prior to 2007.1 will not be supported on Microsoft Vista.

From a licensing standpoint, Microsoft Vista is not a new platform.  We will continue to have three Windows platforms: x86 32 bit, x86 64 bit, and Itanium.  Moving from one Windows version to another does not constitute a platform change.  Moving from one processor family to another is a platform change, whether or not the Windows version changes.  For instance:

  • Moving from Windows XP on an x86-64 computer to Vista on that same computer is not a platform change.
  • Moving from Windows XP on an x86-32 computer to Vista on an x86-64 computer is a platform change.  (Making the same change from an x86-32 computer to an x86-64 computer with Windows XP on both is also a platform change.)

If you have any additional questions about our plans for Vista, please contact Andreas Dieckow (Andreas.Dieckow@intersystems.com).