WebSphere Virtual Enterprise

New 6.1.0.3 Features

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise V6.1.0.3 fully supports VMware ESX Server 3.5 environments. The full complement of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise functionality with VMware ESX Server 3.5 environments, including dynamic clusters, service policy goals with autonomic request flow management (using the Autonomic Request Flow Manager component), and the use of the Application Placement Controller (APC) to place long-running, or batch, jobs when used in conjunction with WebSphere Extended Deployment Compute Grid are supported. In addition, multiple application servers, or nodes, can be supported within an individual virtual or physical machine.

In VMware environments, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise delivers:

• Enhanced isolation characteristics and resiliency

• Ensures an application within a virtual machine does not consume all resources in the virtual machine and impact other applications running in the virtual machine

• Prevents potential over-commitment, by virtual machines, of physical resources (for example, memory)

• Health management of applications - fixing the problem, or routing work around the problem

• Reduction in virtual machine sprawl and increased management efficiencies by increasing utilization of virtual machines and consolidating multiple applications in virtual machines using policy- based workload management. It ensures optimization goals are met across the entire set of virtual machines in the infrastructure.

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise also works with and extends the value of IBM z/VM and IBM PowerVM, if resource allocations are fixed and not modified dynamically. For IBM PowerVM, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise supports:

• LPARs with fixed CPU resources

• LPARs with fixed fractional allocation of CPU resources

• DLPAR with whole (non-shared) allocation

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise does not work with or support dynamic micro-partitioning (shared resource pool across multiple partitions) using the IBM PowerVM virtualization capabilities.

Manages IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 and provides guidance on WebSphere Portal resources and thresholds. WebSphere Portal can participate in dynamic clusters allowing new portal instances will be started to meet capacity needs or work around server failures. Portal instances will be automatically restarted based on health issues. Higher priority portal user requests can be executed before lower priority user requests.

Key Benefits

• Reduce operational and energy costs by increasing utilization of hardware and the leading application servers including Apache Tomcat, JBoss, BEA WebLogic, PHP, and the IBM WebSphere Application Server family (ie. WAS, WAS CE, WAS ND)

• Improve application performance and deliver application response times that meet service level agreements through policy-based workload management that prioritizes and intelligently routes requests according to service level policies

• Increase application availability through application health management that proactively detects and corrects application server problems to minimize administration costs and increase application availability by preventing outages and downtime. Administrators receive visual alerts and can define an action plan to be carried out when problems arise.

• Interruption-free application upgrades through application edition management that enables multiple application versions to run in production at the same time. New versions can be tested and validated before deploying enterprisewide.

• Ensures peaceful co-existence of multiple applications in virtual machines

• Increases availability, performance, and resilience of virtual infrastructure

• Horizontal scalability of virtual infrastructure

• Increase flexibility and agility to quickly supply "capacity" for new applications or services

• All features of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise and WebSphere Extended Deployment fully support Getting Started Sub-capacity Pricing for z/OS. For information on this capabilities, refer to Software Announcement 208-088, dated April 22, 2008.