WebSphere Virtual Enterprise
Overview
WebSphere Virtual Enterprise allows you to pool together resources that are normally kept.
You can also use application virtualization with hardware virtualization capabilities that are provided by the physical hardware on which WebSphere Virtual Enterprise is hosted.
Application infrastructure virtualization
With application virtualization, you can separate applications from the physical infrastructure on which they are hosted. Workloads can then be dynamically placed and migrated across a pool of application server resources, which allows the infrastructure to dynamically adapt and respond to business needs. Requests are prioritized and intelligently routed to respond to the most critical applications and users.
Typically, applications and J2EE resources are statically bound to a specific server. Some of these applications might experience periodic increases in load that last a short time. The most costly time for an application to become unavailable is during a period of high demand. You must build your IT infrastructures to be able to accommodate these peaks. During the majority of time when your systems experience normal load, a large percentage of your computing capacity might go unused, making inefficient use of IT investments.
In a static environment, applications often span multiple EAR files, and are not comprehensively defined so that the application can be portable between environments. Statically deployed applications rely on information that is found in the server to which they are deployed.
In the virtualized dynamic operations environment of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, there is a looser coupling of applications, resources, and server instances. Instead of statically binding applications to servers or clusters, you deploy applications to dynamic clusters, which are application deployment targets that can expand and contract depending on the workload in your environment.
After you deploy your applications to be mobile by using dynamic clusters, the placement of the applications is determined by the operational policies that you define. Autonomic managers control the placement of the server instances and how workload is routed for each application. If workload increases for a specific application, the number of server instances for the dynamic cluster that is hosting the application can increase, using available resources from other applications that are not experiencing increased workload.
Application infrastructure virtualization benefits:
- Improved management of software and applications:
Management processes become more repeatable and less error-prone by using automated services and operational policies.
- Allocation of software resources:
Dynamic reallocation of resources can occur based on shifting distributions of load among applications.
- Increased number of applications:
More applications can run in a virtualized application environment than in a static configuration.
- Reduced configuration complexity:
Loosened coupling between applications and the application server instances reduces the overall complexity and provides for a better, more usable environment.
Application infrastructure virtualization example
Figure 1. Application infrastructure virtualization in a WebSphere Virtual Enterprise environment. You deploy an application to a dynamic cluster that has a specified membership policy or node group. You do not deploy your applications to specific application servers. Instead, the application placement controller starts application server instances for your dynamic cluster based on the settings that you chose for the dynamic cluster.
Figure 2. The starting of an additional application server to react to changes in application load. Additional application servers can start on the nodes that are selected by your dynamic cluster membership policy to handle additional requests that are coming in for the application.
Hardware virtualization
While WebSphere Virtual Enterprise provides virtualization of applications in your environment, you can also deploy WebSphere Virtual Enterprise on virtualized hardware, such as VMware ESX, to take advantage of the capabilities provided by the hosting environment.Hardware virtualization benefits:
- Reduced amount of hardware in your environment:
You can run multiple WebSphere Virtual Enterprise nodes on the same physical hardware.
- Improved hardware management:
You can more manage your environment because you have fewer physical computers and can use the hardware virtualization software to manage your images.
- High availability of hardware:
By configuring server failover, your physical hardware can be highly available. When one server fails, it can be replaced by another server.
- Dynamic allocation of hardware:
The physical resources, such as processors and memory, on your hosting computers can be shared among the virtual servers in your environment and dynamically allocated as needed. Because the resources are dynamically allocated, restarting the servers is not necessary.
- Shared storage:
Multiple virtual servers or logical partitions can share the same physical storage. You do not need a physical hard drive for each virtual machine or LPAR.
WebSphere Virtual Enterprise in an environment with hardware virtualization
WebSphere Virtual Enterprise can operate in supported virtualized hardware environments. Different hardware vendors provide different virtualization capabilities, so the behavior of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise in different hardware virtualization environments can vary. However, common themes exist in hardware virtualization environments, such as the ability to share hardware resources across the virtual servers or LPARs. Hardware virtualization environments can run in shared processor mode or dedicated processor mode. When you use shared processor mode, the physical processors are pooled and shared between the servers or logical partitions that are running on the physical computer. When you use dedicated processor mode, the physical processors are statically assigned to each virtual server or logical partition.
Figure 3. Shared processor mode. In shared processor mode, the physical processors are pooled and shared among the virtual servers or logical partitions.
Restriction: Using the traffic management and application virtualization placement features of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise in an environment with shared processor mode is supported only for specific virtualization platforms.
Figure 4. Dedicated processor mode. In dedicated processor mode, the physical processors are statically assigned to each virtual server or logical partition.
WebSphere Virtual Enterprise can also run in hardware virtualization environments with dedicated processor mode. The processor capacity is statically fixed to each virtual server or logical partition. The capacity and assignment do not change dynamically. Because the processor resource does not change for each virtual server or logical partition, using dedicated processor mode does not affect the traffic management and virtualization features of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise.
Subtopics
Supported hardware virtualization environments
Related concepts
Overview of dynamic operationsVMware Infrastructure 3 platforms and WebSphere Virtual Enterprise
Related tasks
Configure VMware Infrastructure 3 platforms and WebSphere Virtual Enterprise