IBM WebSphere Application Server Binary Provisioning Using MidVision's RapidDeploy Solution.
When a leading UK financial institution had a requirement to provision large numbers of WebSphere environments quickly and consistently, the client turned to MidVision for help. Through the use of the RapidDeploy solution to automate the provisioning of the IBM WebSphere binaries, they were able to achieve an astonishing 533% productivity improvement and a number of other benefits.
Business Needs
The client already had automated and standardised the installation of the operating system and application layers, and wanted to complete the automation suite to provision the middleware binary installations for the following components:
- IBM WebSphere Application Server
- IBM WebSphere MQ
- IBM IHS Server
Additional WebSphere environments had been urgently requested and were required within weeks of the request date, and with no existing capacity available this meant that completely new infrastructure needed to be built and configured.
In total 38 WebSphere cells were required with 152 individual binary installations together with all of the post installation settings applied, such as security configuration and timeout values.
The business requirement was to reduce the scheduled build time from 6 to 1.5 weeks in order to deliver all of the WebSphere cells without impacting project delivery activity.
The Solution
Already an existing user of MidVision RapidDeploy for application build and deployment, the client chose to extend the use of the toolset to cover the additional technology installations within the midrange estate.
The client commissioned MidVision to work with their Unix team to configure the RapidDeploy WebSphere binary installation module to fully automate all of the binary installations and post configuration work.
One MidVision consultant worked collaboratively with the client's existing technical administrators to configure the RapidDeploy Binary installation module. Post configuration and with initial issues ironed out, the actual binary provisioning automation successfully completed in just over 12hours for all 38 cells.
Benefits
Increased speed of environment delivery
A complete deployment of 38 cells with 152 individual binary installations together with post installation configurations took just one week instead of 6, which improved delivery time in excess of 500%.
Optimised resource utilisation
The binary installation automation has resulted in considerable effort being saved on initial environment set up and has enabled WebSphere administrators to be utilised more effectively on higher value work later in the project lifecycle. A total of 130 man days effort was saved across the complete binary installation work package.
Decreased Environment Defects
The RapidDeploy automation checks will highlight any infrastructure build issues or operating system build anomalies early on in the development lifecycle, therefore avoiding costly re-work later in the project.
