Install and configure IBM operational Decision Management Golden topology

Introduction

This article will guide you through the installation and configuration of the IBM operational Decision Management (ODM) V8 deployment environment. This article describes some of the basic concepts that you need to understand about the highly available, scalable WebSphere Application Server network deployment environment, and also describes the ODM server components, and explain the attributes or constraints in these components that affect deployment decisions in a distributed environment.

In addition to discussing the layout of these components in the WebSphere application Server unit topology, we will also describe the other deployment environments that are required to adopt the ODM solution from the development phase to the production phase. Finally, we'll take you step-by-step through the installation and configuration of the ODM reference or "Gold" topology.

In this article, we will use the term ODM to represent the IBM operational Decision Manager V8.0.1 and the previous WebSphere operational Decision Manager V8.0.0.1, but in these contexts , you must have a reference that is specific to the product version.

Background

IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V8.0 is a powerful, highly available, and Java? EE-compatible middleware environment. It provides a platform for hosting and managing enterprise applications that users can use to configure and access related resources for these applications. WebSphere application Server is one of the possible deployment environments for an IBM ODM.

The WebSphere application server configuration contains related application servers, HTTP servers, nodes, clusters, units, and other resources (such as databases), called topologies. For a class of scenarios designed to implement best practices and introduce terminology and decisions made, it is recommended that you use golden topology.

To introduce the ODM gold topology, we will describe the topology-related terminology used in this article.

The ODM topology uses two types of servers:

An application server is a Java virtual machine (JVM) provided by WebSphere application server that runs applications and provides services.

Web servers route content requests in Web applications, and you can call applications that run on the application server. The IBM HTTP server for WebSphere Application Server plug-in provides this functionality, and also enables high availability policies and workload balancing.

When you have multiple servers in an environment, you can configure a logical organization to simplify management and access resources more efficiently. A node is a group of servers that have a node agent capable of managing their servers. The configuration of a node is recorded in its configuration file, and a predefined profile update is called an extension (augmentation). The group of nodes in a cell is a stand-alone server configuration with the same available resources and a collection of nodes for the cluster configuration.

A cell is an administrative domain of a managed node. The process of adding nodes to a cell is called a union. The Deployment Manager is a special node in a unit that provides a central node for managing all parts of a cell. When you use the Deployment Manager to change the configuration of a cell, you must perform a synchronization process on all node agents.

Clusters are typically a set of managed servers in a cell that spans different managed nodes. Clustering enables workload balancing of applications to improve performance or provide a highly available environment. Because the cluster's application deployment has only one logical deployment target, it is very simple.

Servers in the cluster are called cluster members, and servers that are not in the cluster are called stand-alone servers. The types of applications that are typically deployed to stand-alone servers include applications that do not need or do not benefit heavily from workload balancing or high availability policies. This can happen because of the style of accessing the application, the relative importance of the application compared to other applications, or the limitations of application design.

Deploying resources or applications to a WebSphere application Server environment should be done on a specific scope. A scope is a hierarchical concept, for example, a select cell scope deploys resources or applications on cluster members and stand-alone servers in that cell. Deploying scopes is important because deploying related applications on the same server can reduce the overhead of local EJB calls (compared to cross server invocations).

Deployment scopes are useful for defining scalability in a WebSphere application server unit. This concept usually defines two main lines:

The horizontal scalability of the unit allows additional processing capabilities to be provided through the replication node to increase the number of members in each cluster. This type of scalability assumes that deployment is performed in the cluster scope. Workload balancing can take advantage of this additional processing power to create highly available environments or improve application performance.

The vertical scalability of a unit depends on the processing power of each node. This type of scalability determines the amount of processing power available on each node, and it may limit the number of resources available on the node, cluster members, stand-alone servers, and applications that are part of it.

To address these scalability issues, we have introduced the concept of cell topologies. Cell topologies can often be described succinctly by using cell topology diagrams (two of which are later in this article), and it also describes the scalable configuration of a unit in the following ways:

deploying applications in clusters and stand-alone servers

Members of servers in a cluster

Identity of stand-alone server

Standalone server and cluster to node mappings

Accessing resources on different scopes

More complex systems may require multiple units, which are connected by accessing resources, high availability policies, or business processes. For example, you can develop and test applications in different units before you are ready to deploy your application to a production unit. We will introduce an environment topology in which each component unit refers to a particular unit topology.

To illustrate and explain the ODM golden topology, we will now introduce the ODM components and the constraints that apply their deployment.

Introducing ODM components and constraints

ODM is the implementation of IBM's business rules, event management, and processing systems. For a complete description of the ODM component, refer to the ODM Information Center. With the different user roles stored in the Federated repository, you can control access to the ODM component. This article is just a brief introduction to user access management.