By configuring application infrastructure virtualization in WebSphere® Extended Deployment, you can pool together resources that are normally kept separate to accommodate the fluctuations of workload in your environment.
With application infrastructure virtualization, you can separate applications from the physical infrastructure on which they are hosted. Workloads can then be dynamically placed and migrated across a pool of application server resources, which allows the infrastructure to dynamically adapt and respond to business needs. Requests are prioritized and intelligently routed to respond to the most critical applications and users.
Typically, applications and Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) resources are statically bound to a specific server. Some of these applications might experience periodic increases in load that last a short time. The most costly time for an application to become unavailable is during a period of high demand. You must build your IT infrastructures to be able to accommodate these peaks. During the majority of time when your systems experience normal load, a large percentage of your computing capacity might go unused, making inefficient use of IT investments.
In a static environment, applications often span multiple enterprise archives (.ear files), and are not comprehensively defined so that the application can be portable between environments. Statically deployed applications rely on information that is found in the server to which they are deployed.
In the virtualized dynamic operations environment of WebSphere Extended Deployment, the static relationship is replaced with a dynamic relationship with looser coupling of applications or resources and server instances. Instead of statically binding applications to servers or clusters, you deploy applications to dynamic clusters, which are application deployment targets that can expand and contract depending on the workload in your environment.
After you deploy your applications to be mobile by using dynamic clusters, the placement of the applications is determined by the operational policies that you define. Autonomic managers control the placement of the server instances and how workload is routed for each application. If workload increases for a specific application, the number of server instances for the dynamic cluster that is hosting the application can increase, using available resources from other applications that are not experiencing increased workload.
Application infrastructure virtualization benefits: