Companies depend on the IBM® 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