Intelligent Management increases
the quality of service by monitoring the virtualized application server
environment, and by making workload management optimizations or recommendations
based on observed data. This capability is referred to as dynamic
operations.
Increasingly, businesses are rigidly tied to the availability and
speed of applications that deliver essential services to customers.
Loss of availability translates into lost business, which means lost
opportunity and lost revenue. Dynamic operations is a fluid and dynamic
environment, supporting the continuous availability of applications
through application server virtualization and application virtualization,
the dynamic placement of applications, prioritization and flow control
of work to the applications, and integrating with overall dynamic
operations infrastructure management.
In a typical WebSphere® Application
Server environment, there are sometimes static islands of dedicated
resources to particular applications. This static structure leads
to an inefficient use of resources. Some servers are not used to their
full capability, and other servers are overloaded.
Figure 1. Typical WebSphere Application
Server environment
Intelligent Management supports a far
more flexible environment using its dynamic operations features. Dynamic
operations consists of autonomic managers that maximize utilization
using defined business goals. These autonomic managers monitor performance
metrics, analyze the monitored data, offer a plan for running actions,
and can start these actions in response to the flow of work.
Figure 2. Intelligent Management environment
Intelligent Management offers the following
autonomic managers as part of the dynamic operation functionality:
- Autonomic request flow manager
- Controls the order of requests into the application server tier
and the rate of request flows. Using classification and the defined
service goals, the autonomic request flow manager (ARFM) decides how
and when to dispatch HTTP requests to the next tier. The ARFM also
decides when Java Message Service
(JMS) requests are dispatched at the application server tier, even
though JMS requests are not routed through the ODR. For Internet Inter-ORB
Protocol (IIOP) traffic that originates from stand-alone Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB)
clients, ARFM also decides when the requests are dispatched at the
application server tier, even though IIOP traffic is not routed through
the ODR. For IIOP traffic that originates from EJB clients embedded
within a servlet, a web service, or another EJB, the requests are
dispatched immediately because traffic associated with the same overall
user request must not be prioritized at multiple tiers, such as the
Web tier and EJB tier.
- Dynamic workload manager (DWLM)
- Performs load balancing across available application servers.
In particular, for a given request flow, DWLM balances requests across
the available nodes to regulate response times. DWLM dynamically updates
the application status as the application placement controller modifies
a running application infrastructure.
- Application placement controller
- Creates and removes application instances to manage HTTP, SIP,
and IIOP traffic. The application placement controller can dynamically
address periods of intense workflow that otherwise require the manual
intervention of a system administrator. For IIOP requests, only standalone
EJB clients are supported.
- Health management
- Maintains a robust application server environment using a health
policy to identify the criteria that require action. When the criteria
is met, action is taken to ensure that the environment remains healthy.
Autonomic managers with the on demand router (ODR) are the primary
functional parts of dynamic operations. An ODR can be defined and
started before any service policies are defined, but operational policies
can be defined before the appearance of the work to which they apply.
However, if policies are not defined, the early work is handled by
the default policies. When work enters the ODR, an optimization effort
achieves a balance of performance results. As the work flows, the
dynamic workload manager balances the load. As work variations change
and the balance of work in the nodes is upset, the application placement
controller, autonomic request flow manager, and the dynamic workload
manager rebalance running applications to ensure efficient work flows.
The combination of these autonomic managers provides a seamless,
end-to-end dynamic runtime ability.
For transitioning users: In
WebSphere Virtual
Enterprise, controllers start
automatically as highly available managed items unless explicitly
suppressed. In
Intelligent Management,
controllers are dormant until they detect that they are needed. When
the controllers are needed, they become active. When the controllers
detect that they are no longer needed, they become dormant again.
Controllers that are disabled or are in manual mode do not use this
detection capability.
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