Just over a year ago, IBM announced the availability of the initial version of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. Today, an announcement signals the coming availability of WebSphere CloudBurst 2.0, and that brings the major release count up to three in a period of about 12 months (the release of 1.1 came at the end of last year).
You can read the announcement for yourself, but here is a quick overview of the new features and enhancements delivered in the latest version:
- WebSphere Process Server support: You can now provision fully functional, virtualized WebSphere Process Server environments using WebSphere CloudBurst. This adds to the existing support for WebSphere Application Server, and the beta and trial versions of WebSphere Portal and DB2 respectively.
- Multi-image pattern support: In previous versions of WebSphere CloudBurst, all patterns mapped to a single virtual image. This meant your custom patterns could only contain parts (or nodes) from a single product. Now you can build patterns that contain parts from multiple different images. This allows you to represent diverse application environments, for instance, one that includes WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Process Server, and DB2 components, as a single pattern. Of course, this also means installing and initializing these different product components becomes as simple as deploying a single pattern.
- Dynamic system management: During the lifetime of an application environment, it is commonplace to add additional capacity. Specifically for WebSphere environments, this often means adding more nodes and application servers into your landscape. WebSphere CloudBurst 2.0 makes it simple (click of a button) to add more nodes and application servers to a virtual system you previously deployed. Using this new capability, you can quickly scale up your application environment to meet the changing demands of its users. Conversely, you can scale down the environment and remove unnecessary nodes with the simple click of a button as well.
- Intelligence for the runtime: I always talk about the WebSphere intelligence the appliance delivers in terms of deploying and constructing WebSphere application environments. The addition of the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition Intelligent Management Pack means this intelligence starts to make its way into the runtimes of your application environments. Use the new intelligent management pack to enable a policy-based approach to managing your applications. You can enforce application health actions, govern application response times, and even manage the rollout of new versions of your application with no service disruption.
- New Red Hat WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition: The WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition is a virtual image that includes everything from the operating system all the way to the WebSphere Application Server, pre-installed and pre-configured. Initial versions of this virtual image shipped with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Staring in WebSphere CloudBurst 2.0, users can use a new WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition virtual image for VMWare ESX that packages the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server operating system.
As WebSphere CloudBurst marches forward with new releases, a theme becomes apparent: Give users a choice. What do I mean? Well, just look at where WebSphere CloudBurst stands with the 2.0 release:
- You can use WebSphere CloudBurst to provision environments to VMware ESX, PowerVM, and z/VM hypervisor platforms
- You can use WebSphere CloudBurst to provision WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Process Server, DB2, and WebSphere Portal
- You can run your virtualized WebSphere application environments on SUSE, Red Hat, AIX, and zLinux operating systems
Want to see more about the 2.0 release? Check out my new video. This much is inarguable: For running WebSphere application environments in an on-premise cloud, nothing comes close to the capabilities of WebSphere CloudBurst.
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