WebSphere Virtual Enterprise

Features and benefits

New 7.0 Features

Organizations are under tremendous pressure to optimize the management of business applications as the demand for more flexibility in the deployment of applications increases across the enterprise. By extending SOA to private clouds, organizations can realize both the cost savings related to a virtualized infrastructure, managed as a single resource, and the security of a private cloud operating behind the corporate ﬁrewall.

IBM WebSphere® Virtual Enterprise empowers developers, IT and operations managers to intelligently virtualize their application environment and manage the health of their applications to increase the flexibility and agility of the infrastructure to ensure business process integrity, improve service and application performance. WebSphere Virtual Enterprise is able to be consumed via IBM Workload Deployer through the Intelligent Management Pack. Intelligent Management Pack delivers all the capabilities of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, and is preloaded in the WAS Hypervisor Edition virtual images.

What’s new in:

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise V7	WebSphere Virtual Enterprise V6.1.1
Improved On-Demand Routing Support Health management capability now applies to ODR, leading to greater resiliency of the ODR Maintenance mode support, which allows an ODR node to temporarily cease processing of requests while fixes are applied. Support for On-Demand Router dynamic clusters. Centralized logging Eases trace gathering Aliases provide for common sets of traces Consolidation mode Compresses environment into smallest possible footprint to reduce hardware and license utilization Multi-cell management Allows multiple cells to share the same set of physical resources, enabling cell isolation without requiring siloed allocation of physical resources Synergy with Server Virtualization Support for PowerVMs WPARs Support for Solaris Shared Zones server virtualization	AIX Micro-partitioning uncapped shared processor support A new bulletin board service overlay network (BBSON) separates Virtual Enterprise from high availability manager core groups. 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. 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 Manages IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 and provides guidance on WebSphere Portal resources and thresholds.

Key Benefits

Dynamic workload management offers better hardware utilization with lower over-provisioning requirement

Allows the amount of physical compute resource allocated to an application to vary as the demand for that application varies.
Allows administrators to avoid provisioning hardware in siloes for peak utilization by each application. Instead, administrators can allocate for average utilization, with a smaller buffer of extra hardware shared by all applications as they peak.

Application edition management offers better availability

Allows seamless upgrade of applications without taking an outage (higher availability)
Supports rolling upgrades, where only part of a cell is updated at a time
Allows user to try out new version of an application, and roll back if they are not satisfied

Health management offers better availability and resiliency

Supports identification and preemptive mitigation of risk factors that could lead to outages.

-Examples of risk conditions are JVM heaps exceeding a defined threshold or JVM life reaching a defined amount of time.
Results in higher resiliency and availability, as would-be problems are preemptively solved