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Understanding Patterns of Expertise:
Virtual Application Patterns
How IBM PureSystems virtual application patterns can speed deployment,
simplify management, reduce risk and increase agility
Understanding Patterns of Expertise: Virtual Application Patterns 2
Abstract
Enterprise IT departments strive to contribute to the
competitiveness of the business organization, developing and
deploying innovative applications that can help benet the
bottom line and drive top-line growth. Too often, however,
IT managers nd themselves unable to develop and deploy
applications with the agility they would like. The skills needed
to quickly design, test, congure and integrate applications
into complex IT environments can be difcult to nd, and
expert IT staf can quickly become overwhelmed by demand.
Virtualization technology has helped drive efciency
improvements through consolidation of workloads and to a
lesser extent through the management of systems and workloads.
Now virtual application patterns from IBM take these capabilities
a signicant step further. This paper shows how IT organizations
can use patterns of expertise provided by virtual application
patterns to speed deployments, reduce the risk of error, and
help simplify and automate tasks across the management and
maintenance lifecycle.
Introduction
In current enterprise environments, many corporate IT projects
are delivered behind schedule. A Forrester Consulting study
found that 34 percent of new IT projects in the US deploy late
and 25 percent deploy over budget.
1
These factors can severely
limit the business agility that is needed for organizations to
be truly competitive. Even in virtual environmentswhere
application deployment does not have to wait for a physical
server to be ordered and installedmany organizations
have difculty developing, deploying and conguring
multicomponent and multitier applications quickly.
When developing large and complex applications using an
enterprise-class infrastructure, great discipline and care are
essential. IT must be able to set up multitier environments
based on best practices and ensure that these topologies are the
same across development, test and production environments.
Otherwise, an application component that worked in a
developers test environment may not work well on the
integration test server or in production.
Finding and acquiring the right IT skills
Success in application development and deployment requires
strong architecture, detailed design, careful planning and
quality stafng. Many enterprises have a hard time acquiring
the right in-house skills for development and deployment tasks.
Organizations that already have these skills on hand may nd
that they are in such high demand that they become the
bottleneck in the application deployment process.
Implementing an application often requires designing for
multiple server tiers, failover capability and scaling of
applications based on demandwithout over-provisioning
expensive resources. Accomplishing these tasks in an enterprise
environment requires skilled individuals, including:

A software architect who can build out the necessary

application architecture, has previously deployed production
workloads and knows how they react under load

Test and development experts who can ensure that each

component of a complex multitier application is working
properly and meets the enterprises requirements

Expert personnel capable of installing and conguring each of

the components, and providing integration across the many
elements of the environment
All of this design, development, test, conguration and
integration work is necessary, but can cause signicant delays
in getting production applications deployed. Similar delays can
also limit application development. In many organizations, it
can take days or even weeks to request and set up a development
environment, leaving less time for prototyping, developing,
testing and trying diferent approaches. However, if that same
environment can be set up in a few minutes, iterations can occur
more quickly, development cycles can be shortened and the
development team can drive more innovation into applications.
3
Streamlining development and
deployment with patterns
To address these challenges, IBM has introduced the
IBM PureSystems family. This family of systems is
integrated by design and comes with built-in expertise to
provide a simplied IT experience. IBM PureSystems oferings
deliver built-in expertise in a way that is diferent from other
approaches in the market, through patterns of expertise,
which can be seen as the building blocks of capability, with
embedded knowledge automated in various deployment forms
designed to improve time to value. The patterns can deliver
expertise at diferent levels and to diferent roles throughout
the organization.
Patterns of expertise consist of proven best practices for complex
tasks learned from decades of client and partner engagements
that are captured, lab-tested and optimized into a repeatable,
policy-driven form. PureSystems may contain or support
patterns of expertise across infrastructure, platform and
application domains, depending on the particular ofering.
For example, the IBM PureApplication System, a member
of the PureSystems family, comes with built-in infrastructure
and platform patterns and supports the deployment of
application patterns.
One of the diferentiating capabilities of the PureApplication
System is its support for virtual application patterns, a unique
method of delivering an application pattern. This method
enables faster setup of test and development environments and
quicker application deployment than is possible today with
standard approaches to scripted automation of installation,
conguration and integration. With the PureApplication
System, organizations use virtual application patterns to easily
deploy and provision a complete application with platform
services and automated management designed to reduce risk and
operational expense.
Although predened and encapsulated, the patterns in
virtual application patterns can easily be modied based on
an organizations business requirements and desired outcomes.
IBM and independent service providers (ISVs) provide patterns
based on their applications for organizations to use on the
IBM PureApplication System. These virtual application patterns
are available from the online PureSystems Centre, and
organizations can also build their own as described online at
IBM developerWorks (see the For More Information section
at the end of this paper).
Creating a new step on the virtual
technology continuum
With the introduction of the IBM PureApplication System and
virtual application patterns, organizations have a continuum of
choices for increasing the efciency of application development
and deployment in virtual and cloud environments. This
continuum, including virtual appliances, virtual systems and
virtual application patterns, provides increasing levels of value
(see Figure 1). Compared with the rst two elements on the
continuum, which already exist on the market in multiple forms,
virtual application patterns represent a signicant evolution of
what it means to be able to deploy into a cloud and manage the
lifecycle of an application.
Virtual appliances
Practically any customer using virtualization today employs one
or more virtual appliances. By bundling an operating system and
application into a virtual format, virtual appliances help speed
deployment of single-instance solutions. However, since most
IT solutions consist of multiple components and applications,
virtual appliances are a limited solution to the issue of
development and deployment delays.
Virtual systems
Next on the continuum of application deployment are virtual
systems. They range from simple virtual system models for
statically bundling virtual appliances to more high-end models
with built-in intelligence enabling diferent components to
automatically federate together. Virtual systems can eliminate a
signicant amount of manual conguration that would otherwise
need to be performed. This approach provides value because it
speeds deployment and helps ensure conguration consistency.
However, the organization must still bring its own expertise to
bear. Also, once the environment is running, the organization
must devote time to providing traditional lifecycle management
and maintenance using traditional tools.
Understanding Patterns of Expertise: Virtual Application Patterns 4
Figure 1: Evolution of virtual application development, deployment and management.


Virtual application patterns
Highly automated deployments
using expert patterns
Business policy-driven elasticity
Built for the cloud environment
Leverage elastic workload
management services
Software
application
Improved TCO & TTV
Application patterns
are provided via virtual
application patterns
Traditional approach for virtualized solutions
Virtual systems
Automated deployment of
middleware topologies
Traditional administration
and management model
Application and infrastructure-
driven elasticity
Virtual appliances
Standard software installation
and conguration on OS
Images created through
extend and capture
Traditional administration and
management model
Infrastructure-driven elasticity

Metadata
Software
application
Virtual appliance
Operating
system
Metadata
HTTP
server
Metadata
Application
server
Operating
system
Metadata
Application
server
Operating
system
Operating
system
Virtual application patterns
Virtual application patterns take an entirely new and innovative
approach. Instead of worrying about creating and managing
middleware congurations, administrators focus on the policies
and outcomes that the organization wants for the particular
application. The system uses this information to decide on
the right application topology, underlying platform and
middleware capabilities needed to achieve these outcomes, and
then deploys all of the necessary elements. And once deployed,
the PureApplication System continually monitors each of the
deployed subcomponents and will elastically scale them where
appropriate, with the goal of continuing to meet the
organizations declared policies (see the sidebar, Capabilities of
virtual application patterns).
Delivering simplicity for the organization
and user
With virtual application patterns, the organization no longer
needs the skills of an expert to build the architecture or install,
congure, integrate and manage the numerous components that
make up an application deployment. An application designer
simply uses the IBM Virtual Application Builder graphical user
interface (GUI) to make application architecture choices
(see Figure 2).
5
Capabilities of virtual application patterns
IBM PureSystems virtual application patterns are designed
to deliver proven expertise, enabling capabilities that are
essential for developing and deploying applications into virtual
environments and the cloud. They also go beyond develop-
ment and deployment to include automated lifecycle services,
with patterns providing policy-based management, monitoring
and maintenance.
These capabilities include:

Auto scaling: Managed environments scale up and down based on

business service-level agreements (SLAs) specified by the
administrator

Failover: Failed virtual machines (VMs) are replaced with new virtual
machines, which are configured with the same patterns and identity
as the VM replaced

Load balancing: Traffic is automatically balanced across multiple

virtual application servers

Security: Access control lists (ACLs) for application sharing and

management access, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
(LDAP) integration are included for application security

Monitoring: All components of virtual application environments are

monitored by the IBM PureApplication System

Lifecycle management: Built-in components are tuned and tested

to provide efficient deployment and a single point of maintenance
An IBM PureSystems virtual application represents a collection
of application components, behavioral policies and their
relationships. To make choices, the user selects from a palette
of available components on one side of the Virtual Application
Builder GUI, and from conguration options for components,
links or policies on the other side of the GUI. These items are
dragged and dropped into a central canvas, where they are
automatically represented in visual form.
By making these selections, the administrator uses the expertise
in the pattern to provision the environment and perform all of
the conguration and integration necessary to deploy a set of
virtual machines running in the cloud. Choices are made by
the administrator based on desired business outcomes. If the
administrator selects a web application pattern, for example, the
system can automatically congure it to provide for high
availability. The administrator can then apply policy settings so
that the user response time will be no more than a specic
amount (see Figure 3).
This outcomes-based process is diferent from the traditional
approach. Expert IT personnel no longer have to calculate
whether ve serverseach with two front-end web and proxy
servers and integrated with two caching serversare enough to
meet the specic response time requirement for the application.
Instead, using the Virtual Application Builder interface, the
administrator can indicate that the application has priority if
more resources are required to meet a spike in demand. As the
number of users increases against that application, the system
will automatically scale the deployment behind the scenes.
Component
Policy
Palette
containing
available
components
Conguration for
components,
link or policy
Link
Figure 2: IBM Virtual Application Builder interface for constructing patterns.
Understanding Patterns of Expertise: Virtual Application Patterns 6
Figure 3: Policy settings for web application scaling.
Comparing virtual application patterns to
other offerings
Competitor oferings are available today from several vendors.
With these oferings, the deployment process can remain
complex and time-consuming. The administrator may still be
required to put some of the elements together and integrate
them, and each one of those elements must be installed and
congured in a specic way. Best practices may not be codied
into an executable form, like virtual application patterns, leaving
customers to do the conguration and tuning themselves.
In addition, conguration settings and other recommendations
may be provided by a third party, not by the vendor that
developed the software and knows it best.
Diferences between these competitor solutions and
IBM PureApplication System virtual application patterns
become clear when performing a task such as building a
web application deployment, for example (see Figure 4).
An administrator employing a competitor ofering can expect to
take the following steps:

Go to the vendors website and determine the exact four-digit

version of the application required

Find the exact version of the operating system needed

Obtain scripts or a best-practices manual to help congure the

environment

Read through a multipage document and complete the steps

listedincluding manually installing the operating system and
application

Run scripts after installation to congure the system, or

congure it based on best practices described in a lengthy,
multipage document
Contrast this process with the fewer, simpler steps required to
use the IBM PureApplication System with virtual application
patterns:

Download the vendor-provided virtual application, discovered

through the PureSystems Centre

Drag and drop graphic elements in the Virtual Application

Builder GUI to set policies and outcomes for the application
deployment

Let the IBM PureApplication System do the rest

7
Meeting key customer criteria
As organizations consider virtual system solutions,
IBM recommends that they remember these key questions:
Are best practices already built in? Are they provided by the
vendor that knows the application best? And once decided,
can the congurations continue to be used even if the
organization changes its infrastructure or the demand on the
application changes?
IBM PureApplication System virtual application patterns meet
these criteria. The openness of the technology makes it fully
portable if an organization moves to a new infrastructure.
Administrators can run the virtual application patterns on the
IBM PureApplication System or IBM SmartCloudor on the
organizations existing hardware via IBM Workload Deployer.
They can also make copies of their environments with the
best-practices patterns in place to ensure that the same topologies
are consistently used across development, integration test,
performance test, pre-production and production areas.
Additionally, virtual application patterns are produced by the
vendor that knows them best. IBM produces the patterns for its
applications and IBM partner vendors produce patterns for their
own applications. In fact, dozens of partner vendors have built
virtual application patterns and make them available online
via the PureSystems Centre, with oferings ranging from web
applications and databases to customer relationship management
(CRM) solutions.
Organizations adopting IBM PureApplication System virtual
application patterns stand to benet in multiple ways. They can
signicantly improve time to value for key projects, deploying
new applications and services much faster than traditional
approaches. They can also use repeatable patterns to help
ensure adherence to IT policies, such as security or architecture
mandates, for improved governance. And they no longer need
to manually scale out the topology to support a demand spike,
because the system detects changes in demand and reacts based
on policieshelping to reduce support costs.
The bottom line is that application development and deployment
is fast, accurate, repeatable and simple to manage. Ultimately,
it all adds up to increased business agility in a fast-paced
competitive environment.
Figure 4: Comparison of web application deployment steps with and without IBM PureSystems virtual application patterns.

Find exact version of application required
Find exact version of operating system needed
Obtain scripts or best practices manual
Manually install operating system
Manually install application
Congure system using scripts or manual
Deploying an application
Download provided virtual application patterns
Use GUI to set polices and business outcomes
Run on IBM PureApplication System
Steps required today Steps required with virtual application patterns







Please Recycle
For more information
To learn more about virtual application patterns, see your
IBM representative or visit: ibm.com/ibm/puresystems
Or visit our developerWorks trial site at:
ibm.com/developerworks/expert/try.html
Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
IBM Corporation
Software Group
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Produced in the United States of America
September 2012
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This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be
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Statements regarding IBMs future direction and intent are subject to change
or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
1
Based on a 2011 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on
behalf of IBM.
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