A large WebSphere system can have hundreds of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) instances running on more than a dozen physical servers at multiple data centers. To simplify administration and management, many companies employ an infrastructure where numerous client applications share the same JVM cluster with a large, mission-critical enterprise application that they contact for a service or data. However, this architectural model can raise a pronounced risk for a company in terms of the system’s overall stability. Because both the client applications and the enterprise application run on a single clustered JVM, a glitch in one system can affect all of the systems. The system downtime that follows any such failure — and the time it takes to isolate the problem — can adversely affect a company’s bottom line and customer satisfaction.

To help WebSphere system and application professionals avoid such potential stability pitfalls, we discuss three architectural solutions that use topologies based on WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment (ND) and show how you can achieve high resiliency and high stability for your enterprise WebSphere systems. For each solution, we highlight the challenges you may encounter and the factors you should consider when planning the design and implementation of the infrastructure.

Before discussing the challenges you face in choosing the topology to best support and enhance the stability of your WebSphere systems, we take a moment to define our terms in this discussion. By “core application,” we mean a large mission-critical enterprise Java EE application or application suite that executes within the Java EE containers provided by a dedicated WebSphere Application Server system. A “client application” is a Java EE application that typically requests services from the core application. “WebSphere infrastructure” refers to a physical server, such as an IBM midrange server, and other related hardware and system software, such as the operating system software and WebSphere Application Server system software.

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