The Practical, End-to-End Guide to WebSphere (R) Infrastructure Engineering and Technical Management



Companies depend on the IBM (R) WebSphere platform to deliver mission-critical Web applications and services and to provide the foundation for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). To gain maximum value from WebSphere technologies, organizations must implement comprehensive, integrated best practices for managing their WebSphere infrastructures. In this book, one of the most experienced enterprise WebSphere support managers introduces those best practices and explains exactly how to make the most of them.



Drawing on his tremendous real-world expertise, Ying Ding shows how to maximize the WebSphere platform's reliability, stability, scalability, and performance for large enterprise systems. You'll find insightful discussions of each option and strategy for managing WebSphere, including practical guidance on making the right tradeoffs for your environment.



Whether you're a WebSphere administrator, developer, consultant, support manager, engineer, or architect, this book brings together the information you need to run your WebSphere infrastructure with maximum effectiveness and efficiency.



Coverage includes



Planning, hiring, training, funding, and building a world-class WebSphere engineering support organization
Implementing tight standards and consistent, comprehensive processes for managing the entire WebSphere engineering life cycle
Creating optimal testing environments, administering parallel testing pipelines, and managing testing workloads
Empowering production support teams with knowledge, system privileges, and the right tools
Managing production emergencies and critical situations: evaluating problem severity, mitigating customer experience, restoring service, performing post-problem resolution, and much more
Maximizing the stability of large-scale interconnected WebSphere systems for composite applications
Supporting WebSphere platforms that provide end-to-end SOA infrastructure



Introduction 1



Chapter 1: Organization Models and Choices 7

Chapter 2: Building a World-Class WebSphere Team Through Hiring and Training 41

Chapter 3: WebSphere Operations Framework 75

Chapter 4: Engagement Challenges 93

Chapter 5: Server Build 121

Chapter 6: Functional and Integration Testing Environment Support 139

Chapter 7: Stress-Testing Environment Support 153

Chapter 8: Production Environment Support 171

Chapter 9: Managing a Production Emergency 195

Chapter 10: System Upgrade and Product Maintenance Management 239

Chapter 11: Critical Work Relationships 261

Chapter 12: Managing the Stability of Large Enterprise WebSphere Systems 283

Chapter 13: WebSphere Engineering Going Forward 303



Index 321