Planning your network deployment environment

Setting up a network deployment environment involves many decisions, such as the number of physical workstations and the type of pattern you choose. Each decision affects how you set up your deployment environment.

Before you begin

Before you plan your deployment environment complete the following tasks:
  • Choose a database type
  • Identify available resources
  • Identify necessary security authorizations

About this task

When you plan the layout of interconnected servers, you must make some decisions. These decisions influence trade-offs that you make between the available hardware and physical connections, the complexity of the management and configuration and requirements such as performance, availability, scalability, isolation, security, and stability.

Procedure

  1. Identify the functional requirements of the deployment environment.
    1. Identify the features or runtime capabilities of your deployment environment.

      Consider the components that the deployment environment will support, such as the various process applications, toolkits, processes, or modules.

    2. Identify the component types that you will deploy.

      Consider the component types and the interactions between components as part of the requirements.

    3. Identify the import and export implementation types and transports.

      Consider the resources needed for the databases or Java™ Message Service (JMS) resources and the need for business events and their transmission mechanism.

    4. Identify any functional requirements that are not related to applications.

      Consider security servers, routers, and any other hardware or software requirements to handle business events.

  2. Identify the capacity and performance requirements for your environment.
  3. Decide on the number of physical servers that you need for each function.
  4. Identify the redundancy requirements for your environment.
    1. Identify the number of servers that you need for failover.
    2. Identify the number of routers that you need.

      Your choice of router is influenced by exports of deployed modules, the types of queues you define on the service integration bus, Service Component Architecture (SCA) exports, and the type of load balancing that you want among your clusters. IBM® provides an embedded router used for web services exports with Service Object Access Protocol (SOAP)/JMS transports, or JMS exports. However, if you choose not to use this embedded router provided by IBM, you will need to determine how to balance the load among your clusters, based on the technology that you are using.

  5. Design your deployment environment.
    Decide on the pattern. For IBM Business Process Manager, you can select one of two established topology patterns:
    • Single Cluster
    • Application, Remote Messaging, and Remote Support
    Note: If your configuration supports multiple IBM Business Process Manager and non-BPM products in addition to, and compatible with, IBM Business Process Manager, the patterns of those products would be available to you when you create your deployment environment.

    For more information about the patterns and the differences between them, see Topologies of a network deployment environment.

  6. Understand the methods available to you for configuring your deployment environment.

    You can configure a standardized network deployment environment based on a topology pattern template included with the software, and you can implement it using the BPMConfig command or the Deployment Environment wizard.

    You can use the Deployment Environment wizard to create clusters with the Single Cluster and (if applicable) Application, Remote Messaging, and Remote Support topology patterns.

Parent topic: Planning for IBM Business Process Manager