Planning overview

Before using WebSphere® eXtreme Scale in a production environment, consider the following issues to optimize your deployment.

Caching topology considerations

Each type of cache topology has advantages and disadvantages. The caching topology you implement depends on the requirements of your environment and application. For more information about the different caching topologies, see Planning the topology.

Data capacity considerations

The following list includes items to consider:
  • Number of systems and processors: How many physical machines and processors are needed in the environment?
  • Number of servers: How many eXtreme Scale servers to host eXtreme Scale maps?
  • Number of partitions: The amount of data stored in the maps is one factor in determining the number of partitions needed.
  • Number of replicas: How many replicas are required for each primary in the domain?
  • Synchronous or asynchronous replication: Is the data vital so that synchronous replication is required? Or is performance a higher priority, making asynchronous replication the correct choice?
  • Heap sizes: How much data will be stored on each server?
For a detailed discussion of each of these considerations, see Planning environment capacity..

Installation considerations

You can install WebSphere eXtreme Scale in a stand-alone environment, or you can integrate the installation with WebSphere Application Server. To ensure that you are able to seamlessly upgrade your servers in the future, you must plan your environment accordingly. For the best performance, catalog servers should run on different machines than the container servers. If you must run your catalog servers and container servers on the same machine, then use separate installations of WebSphere eXtreme Scale for the catalog and container servers. By using two installations, you can upgrade the installation that is running the catalog server first. See Updating eXtreme Scale servers.