ALBPM integratoin question and answers

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Questions:

1. Ideally, how many ALBPM projects should be deployed in one Engine? And how many processes per project is ideal?
2. Is it correct to have one Engine per each ALBPM Project or its a overkill? Or multiple projects per Engine is ideal?
3. If we deploy multiple projects in one Engine, downtime caused by one project impacts the other projects. What are the best practices in this area?
4. What is the BEA recommeded standard approach for migration of ALBPM project between DEV-QA-PROD, so as to minimize the repetitive tasks & errors? What are the best practices in the area of migration?
5. When to use Ant script and when it's a overkill? When manual migration is ideal? How matured and bug-free are the ALBPM Ant Tasks?

Answers:

1. This completely depends on the environment that you have running, how much load your projects generate, if you're running on an application server and how many clusters there are, how fast they are, how fast is the connection to your database (big one), etc. There is no "ideal" limit. Some choose to have only 1 and others choose to have 20
2. One engine per project would probably be overkill in most cases but it may depend on your project and how many machines you have dedicated to run BPM and what you are trying to achieve. There's no reason to run 2 engines on the same machine as far as I know for speed. Normally the bug limitation in processing is going to be your database so tuning your connections and speed to the database will be the key and then your engine will likely process many projects very quickly. However, you may choose to have seperate engines to better isolate the environment from the affects of other projects
3. AFAIK under normal circumstances the projects shouldn't have an affect on one another. If you find that they are then it would probably best to either speak with support or create a seperate engine for some of these projects.
4. There is a document on migrating http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13154_01/bpm/docs65/upgradeguide/index.html . A best practice would be to use ANT tasks so as to minimize the repetitive tasks and associated errors. Here are the BPM 10g ANT tasks documentation http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13154_01/bpm/docs65/anttasks/index.html.
5. I believe that most projects can carry on their instances to completion so that none of the instances need to be migrated. Migrating the instances is only really handy in the case of long running instances. For other needs just simply run the instances in whatever version you are on and just migrate the source code to the newest version which is usually a piece of cake.