Zend Server 6.1 for IBM i – Woohoo!

Have you looked at Zend Server 6 which was released in April of this year?  Check it out at Zend.com to see the latest in PHP stacks as we now support PHP 5.4.  The first thing you notice about Zend Server 6 is the login screen asks you for a user id and password. That is because we now include role based access to the user interface to Zend Server 6.  This allows companies that have a strict division between developers and administration to set and enforce these roles appropriately.  Enterprise customers can further enhance the experience by tying the admin interface into a LDAP server thus allowing folks to user their normal userid and password to access the interface and a full blown audit trail for changes to configuration files.  Otherwise the ADMIN and DEVELOPER user profiles will work fine.

 


Once logged onto the Zend Server administrative interface, you’ll notice that cleaner and more sleek UI.  The folks in R&D spent a lot of time on usability and focused aggressively on a cleaner interface.  The initial dashboard shows system statistics as well as events that have recently occurred.  And the responsiveness of the screens has tremendously improved over Zend Server 5.

One of the cornerstones to Zend Server 6 is the applications centric environment.  This gives the administrators the ability to fine tune the event monitor rules based upon application and not just at the server level.  One practical example of this is evidenced by an administrator setting up event notification at the application level thus allowing only the production applications to send event email and leaving the more nebulous applications alone.   No need to react of hours cause phpMyAdmin threw a PHP error.

Installation of Zend Server 6 is done in parallel with Zend Server 5.  This gives IBM i shops the ability to set up the environment of before going live.  Once the environment is ready for production all you need to do is flip around a couple of ports.  The default ports administration is placed at 10081 and for web serving is 10080.  These values can be changed in the Apache configuration file when ready.  This separation from UI and Admin brought the IBM i version of Zend Server in line with other platforms and enhances the security by allowing network administrators to block the port from the public.

Zend Server 6.1 is the current version available at Zend .Com and can be downloaded as a complete installable file or as a PTF to Zend server 6.0 which was released back in March of 2013.  Full documentation for Zend Server and the tool kits are available and documentation pages and Zend.Com.