This topic applies only to the Distributed platforms

Choosing a stand-alone or network deployment environment

Choose a stand-alone environment to evaluate the product or to support development of applications and services. Choose a network deployment environment when your production environment needs additional features such as capacity, availability, scalability, and failover support.

A stand-alone environment is the easiest to install and configure, and requires little planning. A network deployment environment needs more extensive installation and configuration tasks that can involve several roles.

For a network deployment environment, you should carefully plan the characteristics with a goal of meeting the requirements of the work that business applications and services are to perform on it. There are multiple aspects to consider, including the following:

Number of physical workstations and hardware resources that you require
Number of clusters and cluster members required to support your business
Number of databases required
Authentication roles and security considerations
The method that you will use to implement the deployment environment
Other supporting resources such as a user registry (for security), one or more HTTP servers (for web content), necessary firewalls, load balancers, and so on.

Stand-alone environment

You can use a stand-alone environment to deploy service component architecture (SCA) modules in one server process.

Figure 1. A stand-alone environment

A stand-alone environment, showing the stand-alone server and the administrative console that is used to manage the environment.

To evaluate the product or to support development of applications and services, you can install samples to deploy a sample solution to the stand-alone server. You can explore the resources used for this sample in the administrative console.

To start with a stand-alone environment and then to include it into a network deployment environment, federate it into a deployment manager cell. You can do so only if no other nodes have been federated to that cell.

When you install the product software, you can choose to create the profile for a stand-alone development environment (qwps). The profile that is created is suitable only in a test scenario or to support application development. For a scenario in which you want a stand-alone server environment for production purposes, install the product software. Then use the Profile Management Tool or manageprofiles command-line utility to configure the stand-alone profiles.

Network deployment environment

A network deployment environment contains a collection of interconnected servers and clusters to run your service requester and provider enterprise applications and their mediation modules. The environment can also include application servers on WebSphere® Application Server.

A network deployment environment provides a collection of interconnected servers and clusters that support application components:

Process Server
Performance Data Warehouse
Business Process Choreographer
Business rules
Mediations
Relationships

The environment also supports servers for WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus and WebSphere Application Server.

Figure 2. A network deployment environment

A network deployment environment, showing the cell that includes a deployment manager, its administrative console that is used to manage the environment, a node agent on each workstation, several clusters distributed across the nodes, and additional components.

The servers and clusters run on one or more managed nodes, each of which corresponds to a logical or physical computer system.

Servers can be grouped into clusters to support load-balancing and failover.

A deployment environment of interconnected servers or clusters provides performance, availability, scalability, isolation, security, and stability characteristics that cannot be provided by a stand-alone server. In addition, you can manage all the servers or clusters from a centralized deployment manager.

A complete collection of servers and clusters managed by a deployment manager is configured and managed as a deployment environment.

To install a network deployment environment, install the product software, and then configure profiles for a deployment manager and one or more custom (managed) nodes. Later, you can create the deployment environment to be managed. You can create a standardized deployment environment from provided topology patterns, or you can configure clusters and servers to create a customized deployment environment.

How intended usage affects your choice of stand-alone or network deployment cluster topology pattern

The following table shows how the intended use of IBM® Business Process Manager affects your choice of stand-alone or a network deployment cluster topology pattern, and the associated amount of planning involved:

Table 1. Choice of stand-alone or network deployment cluster topology pattern for intended use of IBM Business Process Manager
Intended use	Configuration path and planning activities
A single server Unit Test Environment (UTE)	The stand-alone profile configuration path, with little planning required.
A clustered test environment	Standard Remote Messaging and Remote Support topology pattern of network deployment environment, with little planning required.
A production environment, with good flexibility	Standard Remote Messaging and Remote Support topology pattern of network deployment environment, with little planning required.
A highly optimized production environment	A customized topology that addresses unique processing requirements and business requirements. Detailed planning required as described in this section of the documentation.

For more information about selecting an appropriate cluster topology pattern, refer to the related concepts links.