Chapter 5: WebSphere Portal in a Sysplex

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This chapter was written by the WebSphere Portal development team to show some aspects of the Portal in a sysplex environment. Sysplex is a unique feature of the zSeries architecture and we thought it might be a good idea to show the sysplex scaling and availability possibilities when using Portal on zSeries.

5.1 Configuring WebSphere Portal in a Sysplex

Configuring WebSphere Portal in a sysplex environment means that you set up the application server of WebSphere Portal in WebSphere Application Server with replicated server instances on multiple systems within a sysplex. Using a sysplex distributor in front of the portal server instances makes this change completely transparent to the client. That is, from a client perspective, the application server of WebSphere Portal listens to a single Virtual IP Address (VIPA) that is defined to the sysplex distributor. The sysplex distributor then routes incoming requests to the single server instances of the application server, depending on availability and workload on the hosting system.

Therefore, the benefits of such a configuration are:

• Increased performance

• Workload balancing between the systems within the Sysplex

• High availability

For further information, refer to z/OS Communications Server IP Configuration Guide, SC31-8775-01.

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