Application Level Partitioning
Application Level Partitioning involves the partitioning of applications and data, thereby improving databases as well as in-memory caching and workload management -- leading to improved performance and scalability.

WebSphere Extended Deployment capabilities
As mentioned in the earlier section, IBM's focus was to build its product lines to support On Demand infrastructure computing. With the release of WebSphere Extended Version, IBM demonstrates their commitment towards providing the On Demand infrastructure environment.

Basically, WebSphere Extended Deployment extends WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment Version 5.1. You should notice that WebSphere Extended Deployment is an extension to the WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment version 5.1.x product. WebSphere Extended Deployment is not functional without the Network Deployment installation.

Upon installation, WebSphere Extended Deployment auto-senses the Network Deployment installation and extends the functionality of the Network Deployment product to embrace the themes and additional functionality of WebSphere Extended Deployment. This would be very similar to when Network Deployment takes control when it's installed and deployed over the base version.

As shown in Figure A, WebSphere Extended Deployment capabilities were developed to help WebSphere customers deal with the IT scalability and performance challenges of On Demand operations.

FIGURE A

This graphic illustrates the dynamic, complex IT environment. Click picture for a larger image.

WebSphere Extended focuses primarily on the following key areas of infrastructure management: Dynamic operations (Virtualization), Extended manageability, and High performance computing.

In the next section, we'll "deep-dive" into these areas separately.

Virtualization and dynamic operations
In WebSphere Extended Deployment, a virtualized environment is implemented by creating pools of resources that can be shared among applications to optimize utilization and to help simplify the allocation of WebSphere resources to meet high volume transactions. Resource pooling is achieved using node groups and dynamic clusters.

A node group is a pool of nodes with a common set of capabilities and properties, for example, connectivity to a given network or database. A dynamic cluster is a set of virtual servers similar to a static cluster, but the number and placement of cluster members can vary over time.

Dynamic operations provide the features to monitor the Application Server environment and make optimizations or recommendations based on the data gathered. To enable this feature inside WebSphere environment, the autonomic intelligent managers below were developed as part of an extended deployment configuration.

• Autonomic request flow manager
• Dynamic workload manager
• Application placement controller
• Health management

The autonomic managers, in conjunction with the ODR (On Demand Router), are the primary functional parts of WebSphere dynamic operations. The service policy, or user defined performance goals, is defined prior to initialization of the ODR.