Roadmap: Production and delivery environment
The production environment represents the servers that incoming web traffic accesses to experience your digital experience. It does not have to be a cluster. This environment could multiple clusters, a portal farm, or a stand-alone server, depending on your business needs. However, this roadmap is based on a cluster topology. In a cluster, the portals share a common configuration and the load is distributed evenly across all cluster instances.
The Configuration Wizard prompts you to select the cluster type, static, or dynamic. By default, the cluster type is static. A static cluster is a group of application servers in a IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Network Deployment environment that participates in workload management. A dynamic cluster monitors performance and load information and is able to dynamically create and remove cluster members that are based on the workload. You can add extra nodes to expand the capacity of the dynamic cluster.
Before version 8.5, you were required to install and configure IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise to set up a dynamic cluster. Now, the virtual enterprise component is integrated with the application server. Therefore, you do not need to install and configure WebSphere Virtual Enterprise before you set up a dynamic cluster.