IBM Workload Deployer 3.0 has just come out along with the DB2 images I developed. IWD is a major revision of what was formerly known as WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. The idea behind it is that it lets you plug a box into your existing virtualization infrastructure (VMWare, pSeries, etc) and make it feel more like a proper private cloud with image templates, automation, reproducible deployments, monitoring, and such things.
I developed the three DB2 images and, along with Dustin, the script packages and topology patterns that make them integrate nicely with WebSphere Application Server. Here’s a screenshot of what one of those patterns looks like in the IWD pattern editor:
In addition to the images made available on the appliance, we are making five additional DB2 image templates available for download. They add Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an OS option as well as bump up the DB2 version to V9.7 FP4 and enhance the High Availability enablement on the AIX-based DB2 Enterprise image.
When you hear WebSphere folks talking about “DB2 Hypervisor Edition”, these images are what they are talking about.
I learned a lot about the arcana of Linux and AIX administration developing these, though of course learning a lot about something always highlights how much more one has to learn. Regardless, I’ve harvested some of that for a couple blogposts this past winter, and I hope to post more about it in the coming weeks.
On a side note, if you are interested in more of a Database-as-a-Service rather than Infrastructure-as-a-Service approach, IWD 3.0 also comes with Workload Pattern for DB2. It abstracts things to a higher level by letting you provision databases directly, which can be a nice option to have.
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