Overview: Deployment environment topologies and patterns

What is a topology?

A topology is the physical layout of the deployment environment required to meet your business needs for capacity, availability, and scalability.

You can set up topologies for both the Process Center and Process Server components of IBM® Business Process Manager.

Many factors affect how you design and implement your topology. For example, you must consider business and application requirements, resource requirements and constraints, the intended purpose of the environment, and the operating system.

Each topology pattern has certain design characteristics that address a particular business need. For example, on distributed systems, the Single Cluster topology pattern is typically used for a testing or proof of concept scenario. On z/OS® systems, this topology pattern is the default pattern and can be used in production environments.

The design characteristics of each topology have been captured as topology patterns that are supplied as configuration templates with the product.

The purpose of deployment environment patterns

A deployment environment topology pattern specifies the constraints and requirements of the components and resources involved in a deployment environment. There are IBM-supplied topology pattern for each topology layout. These topology patterns provide rules and guidelines for component interaction that are characteristic of the most commonly used BPM topology patterns. The IBM-supplied topology patterns are based on well-known and tested configuration scenarios. They contain a repeatable and automated method of creating a deployment environment. Each topology pattern is designed to meet the configuration requirements and business needs of the associated topology. Using topology patterns helps you create a deployment environment in the most straightforward way.

Because the deployment environment topology patterns represent recommended topologies with component configurations that work together, you can be sure that you are building a fully functional deployment environment. You can use the configuration rules of a deployment environment topology pattern to generate a fast path configuration. This action is possible because many design decisions are implemented in the topology pattern; for example, which components to configure, and which default parameters and resources are needed.

Databases and deployment environments

You or your database administrator might need to create and configure databases outside the installer.

For more information, see Planning your database configuration.

Functions of IBM-supplied deployment environment topology patterns

Any IBM Business Process Manager deployment contains a basic set of functions that together form a complete production environment.

To design a robust deployment environment, you must understand the functionality that each cluster can provide in an IBM-supplied topology pattern. You can allocate a specific type of function (for example, the support infrastructure function) to a particular cluster. Understanding the functions can help you choose the deployment environment topology pattern that best meets your needs.

For network deployment, clusters can collaborate to provide specific functionality to the environment. Depending on your requirements, you assign specific functions to each cluster within the deployment environment, to provide performance, failover, and capacity.

The clusters configured in a deployment environment provide the following functions.

For topologies in all environments, the fundamental pieces of IBM Business Process Manager is always similar. In all IBM Business Process Manager cells, the deployment manager is the central point of administration for the cell.