Choose a stand-alone environment or ND environment for IBM BPM

IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Install IBM BPM > Plan for IBM BPM

Choose a stand-alone or ND environment

Choose a stand-alone environment to evaluate the product or to support development of applications and services. Choose a ND environment when your production environment needs additional features such as capacity, availability, scalability, and failover support.

A stand-alone environment is the easiest to install, and requires little planning. A ND environment needs more extensive installation and configuration tasks that can involve several roles.
For an ND environment, you should carefully plan the characteristics with a goal of meeting the requirements of the work that business applications and services are to perform on it. There are multiple aspects to consider, including the following:

Number of physical workstations and hardware resources that you require
Number of clusters and cluster members required to support your business
Number of databases required
Authentication roles and security considerations
The method that you will use to implement the deployment environment
Other supporting resources such as a user registry (for security), one or more HTTP servers (for web content), necessary firewalls, load balancers, and so on.

Stand-alone environment
You can use a stand-alone environment to deploy service component architecture (SCA) modules in one server process.
Figure 1. A stand-alone environment

To evaluate the product or to support development of applications and services, you can install samples to deploy a sample solution to the stand-alone server. You can explore the resources used for this sample in the administrative console.
To start with a stand-alone environment and then to include it into an ND environment, federate it into a dmgr cell. You can do so only if no other nodes have been federated to that cell.
When install the product software, you can choose to create the profile for a stand-alone development environment ( qwps). The profile that is created is suitable only in a test scenario or to support application development. For a scenario in which you want a stand-alone server environment for production purposes, install the product software. Then use pmt.sh or manageprofiles command-line utility to configure the stand-alone profiles.

Network deployment environment

A ND environment contains a collection of interconnected servers and clusters to run your service requester and provider enterprise applications and their mediation modules. The environment can also include application servers on WebSphere Application Server.
A ND environment provides a collection of interconnected servers and clusters that support application components:

Process Server
Performance Data Warehouse
Business Process Choreographer
Business rules
Mediations
Relationships
The environment also supports servers for WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus and WebSphere Application Server.
Figure 2. A ND environment

The servers and clusters run on one or more managed nodes, each of which corresponds to a logical or physical computer system.
Servers can be grouped into clusters to support load-balancing and failover.
A deployment environment of interconnected servers or clusters provides performance, availability, scalability, isolation, security, and stability characteristics that cannot be provided by a stand-alone server. In addition, you can manage all the servers or clusters from a centralized dmgr.
A complete collection of servers and clusters managed by a dmgr is configured and managed as a deployment environment.
To install an ND environment, install the product software, and then configure profiles for a dmgr and one or more custom (managed) nodes. Later, you can create the deployment environment to be managed. You can create a standardized deployment environment from provided topology patterns, or you can configure clusters and servers to create a customized deployment environment.

How intended usage affects your choice of stand-alone or ND cluster topology pattern

The following table shows how the intended use of IBM BPM affects your choice of stand-alone or an ND cluster topology pattern, and the associated amount of planning involved:

Choice of stand-alone or ND cluster topology pattern for intended use of IBM BPM
Intended use Configuration path and planning activities

A single server Unit Test Environment (UTE)

The stand-alone profile configuration path, with little planning required.

A clustered test environment

Standard Remote Messaging and Remote Support topology pattern of ND environment, with little planning required.

A production environment, with good flexibility

Standard Remote Messaging and Remote Support topology pattern of ND environment, with little planning required.

A highly optimized production environment

A customized topology that addresses unique processing requirements and business requirements. Detailed planning required as described in this section of the documentation.

For more information about selecting an appropriate cluster topology pattern, refer to the related concepts links.

Plan for IBM BPM

Related information:

Topologies of an ND environment
Considerations for selecting a topology

Intended use	Configuration path and planning activities
A single server Unit Test Environment (UTE)	The stand-alone profile configuration path, with little planning required.
A clustered test environment	Standard Remote Messaging and Remote Support topology pattern of ND environment, with little planning required.
A production environment, with good flexibility	Standard Remote Messaging and Remote Support topology pattern of ND environment, with little planning required.
A highly optimized production environment	A customized topology that addresses unique processing requirements and business requirements. Detailed planning required as described in this section of the documentation.