Introduction

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In today's economic environment, enterprises seek to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their business applications while improving responsiveness to new business requirements and overall customer satisfaction. These enterprises realize that by reducing costs, including the cost of system management associated with expensive, underused IT infrastructures, the savings can be invested in new business opportunities. The challenge of reducing TCO can be significantly addressed with a first step towards an on-demand operating environment, namely, one in which the IT resources are shared or virtualized.

Virtualization enables a collection of computing resources to be shared and managed as if they were one large virtual resource. A virtualized environment makes the most efficient use of its resources by sharing resources and providing what is needed only when it is needed. Not only are resources highly used, excess capacity can easily be used for new or unexpected needs.

If virtualization were easy, it would be more pervasive today. There are, however, many technical challenges to attain virtualization. IBM augmented its on-demand vision with new offerings and the creation of a roadmap that leads to virtualization across servers, storage, networks, and distributed software and applications. With these offerings IBM makes it possible for enterprises to virtualize their resources starting today.

This chapter explains steps that enterprises can take today using new and enhanced features of WebSphere Application Server, Version 5 to implement virtualization through resource sharing at the level of the Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™) application server. Several architecture scenarios for deploying applications are discussed. The chapter also includes sample scripts to demonstrate how resources in the documented architectures are deployed and administered. The architectures and principles discussed can be applied when preparing to automate resource virtualization.

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