Ruth Willenborg is is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM®, and until recently, was manager of the WebSphere® Performance team. Ruth was responsible for WebSphere performance analysis and benchmarking activities and the development of WebSphere monitoring interfaces and tools. She has written and spoken extensively on all aspects of WebSphere performance and is co-author of Performance Analysis for Java Websites.
Ruth hates to see information stay buried within the development lab, leading her to write and speak extensively on all things WebSphere performance related - from best practices to performance features, monitoring, and tuning. She also loves to "nag" and uses this technique frequently to encourage many other WebSphere-related articles from her team and anyone else who will listen.
Ruth grew up in Tonawanda, New York (outside Buffalo) and really wanted play hockey.
In the early 70's, girls didn't play hockey, so Ruth took up tennis. Ruth escaped the
snow to attend Duke University where she earned her B.S. in Computer Science and thoroughly
enjoyed playing tennis outside year round. After college, Ruth joined IBM, where she has
worked for 20+ years in a variety of different software development jobs.
Virtual appliances are an interesting new concept combining many of the benefits of appliances with the advantages of virtualization. This article discusses the advantages of using virtual appliances for software delivery, as well as the challenges that this new paradigm faces.
One significant advantage of server virtualization is the ability to rapidly provision new environments by using libraries of virtual image templates. Automated provisioning requires the handling of operating system, network, and application specific customization. This article provides a sample framework for automating virtual image deployment and activation, including example code for quickly and easily provisioning new WebSphere Application Server environments.
One significant advantage of server virtualization is the ability to rapidly provision new environments by using libraries of virtual image templates. This article offers an approach and sample scripts for using WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment inside virtual machine templates. The approach leverages new capabilities provided in WebSphere Application Server V6, making the process of creating a template installation that is easily copied and customized for a new host much easier.
This is an updated version of a similarly-named article published in the WebSphere Developer Technical Journal in 2004. This revision takes into account changing technology trends and, more importantly, recommends certain practices that the authors assumed would be commonly followed, but, as they have learned, are not.
Although the concept isn't new, there is more interest in virtualization now than ever before. The benefits of subdividing one physical server into several virtual ones include server consolidation, isolation, rapid provisioning, and even performance. New improvements in hardware and virtualization technologies now offer the opportunity to also improve installation, configuration, deployment processes, and even how you work on your laptop.
A historical perspective on the evolution of
different WebSphere Application Server performance features, such as workload management,
resource pooling, and caching.
When I started working on performance, I went looking for the type of information in this book.
It did not exist anywhere, so we wrote it. Provides a great foundation on terminology and
processes for performance testing, analyzing performance, and removing bottlenecks.
Contains both general Web site performance content and Java™ specifics.
This book is quite different from the information covered in
Performance Analysis for Java Websites. Start with Performance Analysis for Java Websites, and then look to this book for more WebSphere specifics.
