Tivoli® Intelligent Orchestrator is the IBM® standard tool for provisioning. With Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, a WebSphere® Extended Deployment topology can obtain more physical computing resources from outside a node group.
Depending on your environment, adding a server to an application server cluster that is managed by Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator might involve installing and un-installing WebSphere Extended Deployment. Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator can automatically install WebSphere Extended Deployment on servers and configure server network connectivity.
When demand distribution within a WebSphere Extended Deployment enterprise shifts between node groups, the ability to compensate extends beyond the boundaries of the autonomic managers in WebSphere Extended Deployment. When you integrate with Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, the size of the WebSphere Extended Deployment node groups can be automatically extended based on fluctuating demand. You can share servers among multiple application environments with multiple WebSphere Application Server cells or environments that are not using WebSphere software.
Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator monitors and manages a set of different resource pools, for example, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ Series, service access point (SAP), and e-mail. Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator ensures that the processing power of these resource pools in the form of machines, logical partitions (LPARs), processors, and so on, is allocated in accordance with business goals. With the WebSphere Extended Deployment provisioning engine, Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator receives information that it can use to compute allocations of available resources within the scope of a WebSphere Extended Deployment topology. Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator allocates physical resources among the candidate node groups.
The autonomic provisioning for WebSphere Extended Deployment can be done on two levels: autonomic decisions based on central processing unit (CPU) objectives, and autonomic decisions based on end-to-end performance goals. Autonomic provisioning of servers to node groups can be performed based on CPU objectives that are defined in the form of the fitness function used by the standard Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator application controller. The CPU objectives are defined for each Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator and WebSphere Application Server cluster. To enable autonomic provisioning based on end-to-end performance goals, WebSphere Extended Deployment implements an objective analyzer that is specialized for WebSphere Extended Deployment.
WebSphere Extended Deployment manages resources through autonomic managers to meet system goals. The autonomic managers can reorder client requests, modify the behavior of running applications on WebSphere Application Server, and deploy additional cluster instances for an application. Various possible provisioning steps are associated with managing dynamic clusters in WebSphere Extended Deployment. See Dynamic application placement for information on provisioning in WebSphere Extended Deployment.
The key function that is delivered by Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator to WebSphere Extended Deployment is to add or remove servers from the working set that is used by WebSphere Extended Deployment. Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator has the knowledge of server-free pools, application-wide service-level agreements, and cross-business information necessary for deciding when to change the number of servers allocated to WebSphere Extended Deployment. Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator leverages this knowledge to determine the best allocation of servers across the entire data center.
With WebSphere Extended Deployment Version 6 and later, you can handle shared resources without Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator by using overlapping node groups. Because nodes can be members of multiple node groups, the performance of applications in several node groups in a shared set of nodes can be optimized directly. Use overlapping node groups instead of using Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator to move nodes between node groups to get the best performance from your WebSphere Extended Deployment installation.