A deployment environment is a collection of configured clusters, servers, and middleware that collaborates to provide an environment to host Service Component Architecture (SCA) interactions. For example, a deployment environment might include a host for message destinations and administrative programs.
Planning deployment environments requires that you design the physical layout (topology) of the deployment environment so you can meet your business needs for capacity, availability, scalability and failover support. Some key aspects of the design involve the number and relative placement of the servers on the hardware that comprises your deployment environment.
It is possible to deploy mediation modules to a stand-alone server. This is the easiest environment to set up, but a stand-alone server does not connect to other servers, its capacity is limited to the resources on the same computer system, and it does not include failover support.
If you require more capacity, scalability, availability or failover support than a stand-alone server provides, you need to consider a deployment environment of interconnected servers.
A deployment environment is a collection of interconnected servers that supports mediation modules
The servers in a deployment environment can run on one or more host systems. Servers can be grouped into clusters to support load-balancing and failover.
In addition to the performance, availability, scalability, isolation, security, and stability characteristics that cannot be provided by a stand-alone server, a deployment environment of interconnected servers or clusters has the additional advantage that you can manage all the servers or clusters from a centralized deployment manager.
Regardless which method you use to create the deployment environment, you can still manage some aspects of the deployment environment using the administrative console. (For example, you can add more nodes to the deployment environment.) However some aspects you cannot change if you created the deployment environment using options 1 or 2. (For example, you cannot change database types.)