Prepare for IBM pureapplication System (i) Overview of application Migrations

Brief introduction

IBM Pureapplication System is an integrated hardware and software device that optimizes workloads and is designed to significantly simplify the development, provisioning, and management of applications in a private cloud environment. It has integrated management capabilities that allow flexible applications, databases, and other workloads to be delivered through self-service services.

A number of key datacenter concepts have been redefined using pureapplication SYSTEM,IBM. Hardware and software depths are integrated to provide unmatched levels of automation, performance, and simplicity. To better leverage this power in your business, it is important to carefully consider your application portfolio and focus on how to take advantage of these features. This article series is based on an application-centric perspective that helps you understand how to prepare for pureapplication System in your organization and maximize its value.

This series of articles, consisting of several parts, includes:

Part 1th: Overview of application migrations (that is, this article)

Part 2nd: Is your application ready for virtualization? By answering a series of questions, you can determine which deployment options are best for your application.

Part 3rd: Select database options: Learn which database options are best for you and learn some recommended best practices.

Part 4: Use advanced middleware configuration tools to migrate your applications to the cloud: Migrate your applications with advanced middleware configuration tools and then deploy your application instance to the cloud in a single step.

Part 5th: Using rational application Developer to develop virtual application patterns for IBM Workload deployer: Learning to use rational application Developer and IBM Work Load Deployer A combination of virtual application patterns to develop cloud applications.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the Pureapplication System features associated with the application lifecycle. This will help you understand how to identify and migrate existing applications to workloads, and which features are best for your application. See this article as a roadmap to guide you through the other articles in this series.

Pureapplication System Workloads

The Pureapplication System contains many predefined workload patterns. Each of these patterns defines a set of underlying system resources, scripts, monitoring, and management behavior. When you deploy an application using one of these patterns, pureapplication System automatically supplies and configures these resources, setting these behaviors so that you can focus on the actual application. Pureapplication system supports two types of workloads: virtual applications and virtual systems. Both models can automate a large number of cumbersome application settings and monitoring work, but there are some important differences between them.

With virtual applications, Pureapplication System is responsible for most of the supply and management of applications. This can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership, but only applies to restricted applications that conform to that pattern. With virtual systems, you will gain more control and therefore be responsible for:

Which virtual machines are supplied

Which software components are installed

which scripts to run

How to monitor it

Here we will describe the two models, first introducing the virtual application.

Virtual applications

Pureapplication System can understand a variety of virtual application patterns, such as basic Java™ applications or WEB applications. In order to deploy the application as a virtual application pattern, you need to create an application model. This model tells Pureapplication system about how to supply and configure all the necessary information about the application, including which artifacts the application consists of, which systems it needs to connect to, what resources it needs, and you want pureapplication system What policies are used to manage applications (such as extended policies that provide flexibility).

When supplying components, the Pureapplication system automatically supplies all of the required systems components, such as virtual machines, application servers, and so on. It automatically configures these components based on your application model (setting up the data source, providing monitoring and triggers to achieve flexibility, and so on). It can even monitor the load of the application and supply (or reclaim) system resources based on the requirements of the application. As a result, pureapplication system will be responsible for managing applications, reducing management costs, optimizing the use of system resources, and achieving higher application densities than traditional deployments.

Each virtual application pattern is designed to contain a set of best practices for setting, configuring, monitoring, and managing the infrastructure and software platforms to support workloads. As a result, virtual applications will greatly optimize the use of pureapplication System resources. To achieve this goal, the virtual application pattern needs to make some assumptions about which applications can run.

Each virtual application pattern has specific compatibility criteria that can be evaluated against these criteria to determine if the schema supports the application. For example, these standards (the specifications used by the application and how the application statements are handled) can determine whether an application can run as a virtual application. As you can see, IBM provides evaluation criteria to help you determine whether a given application is compatible with virtual application mode.

Although you can define your own virtual application pattern, this is an advanced topic that goes beyond the scope of this article series.

Virtual System mode

In contrast, virtual system mode gives you more control. You define virtual machine mirroring, the software components that are installed in it, the script package that runs to configure them, and any monitoring agents that you want to include. Virtual systems provide repeatable, consistent, and rapid deployment time for simple and complex middleware configurations while retaining control and flexibility in the traditional middleware environment.

You will define these patterns using the pureapplication System pattern Editor, which is similar to the way you design a traditional topology using a model-driven approach. With pattern Editor, it is easy to create a virtual system model using IBM Hypervisor Edition mirroring. You can even create your own virtual mirrors from scratch, simply by capturing or importing virtual machine mirroring and adding packages.

Pureapplication system contains a number of predefined virtual system patterns that apply to a common application topology. These patterns represent best practices and "golden Topology" for applications running on IBM middleware. Consider these patterns as starting points, which provide a standard set of topologies for applications in your organization. You can add additional software, script packages, and configuration options that tailor these patterns to your application and environment.

This approach is flexible, but not without cost, for workloads that can run on the pureapplication System. In particular, the process of managing your own compatible virtual machine mirroring directory over time can be cumbersome and costly. When delivering the evolving set of content defined in virtual system mode, we recommend that you take advantage of the IBM Hypervisor Edition mirroring and scripting packages to minimize the size of the mirrored directory.

When creating a virtual system pattern, it is best to think about how the schema supports multiple applications, which requires a layered approach. If you have too much content in virtual machine mirroring, the pattern will be difficult to reuse. The common practice is to include the operating system and middleware in the mirror, and then use the script package to provide the application and configure the middleware. This leads to a better reuse capability.

To simplify this process for websphere® applications, the Pureapplication System contains advanced middleware configuration (AMC) tools. AMC makes it easier to create repeatable, deployable virtual system patterns. This includes applications and configurations by introspective the existing application units, extracting all configuration details, encapsulating them into a script package, and rebuilding the configuration while deploying the schema. This is useful for WebSphere application Server applications that do not conform to any of the Pureapplication System virtual application patterns, which are restricted and do not have a complete, reusable, reliable set of deployment and configuration scripts.