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Leveraging the IBM Workload Deployer CLI to automate WebSphere application deployment

15 Aug, 2011
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A few months ago I blogged about the integration between Deployit and IBM WebSphere CloudBurst (since renamed to IBM Workload Deployer). While that article gave an overview of the integration and included some nice screenshots, it did not really go into the details. Now is the time to explore the implementation of this integration..

Workload Deployer V3 and Deployit from XebiaLabs both "deploy" things, but they deploy different things. Deployit deploys application artifacts and resources, such as EAR files and data sources, to middleware systems like IBM WebSphere Application Server (but also HTML to web servers, IBM WebSphere MQ configurations to queue managers, and so on). IBM Workload Deployer, on the other hand, deploys patterns (or topologies) of virtual images to hypervisors — but not just any kind of virtual images. IBM Workload Deployer is especially geared toward deploying middleware topologies.

IBM Workload Deployer V3 is an updated and enhanced version of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, renamed to reflect the expanded scope of workloads it can deploy, which are no longer limited to only WebSphere workloads. The content for this article (including screen captures) was created using a WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, but everything noted here is equally applicable to IBM Workload Deployer V3. However, for the sake of consistency with the images presented, "WebSphere CloudBurst" is used throughout this article to refer to both products.

In other words, IBM Workload Deployer deploys the middleware systems and Deployit deploys applications to those middleware systems — complementary functionalities that form a perfect fit.

At XebiaLabs, we have been working on two exciting new integrations for Deployit. We created a Deployit plugin that enables you to deploy EAR files directly to virtual systems created by IBM Workload Deployer V3 or its predecessor, IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance V2. We also created a WebSphere CloudBurst script package to deploy application artifacts and resources on newly created virtual systems.

This article explores two integrations between WebSphere CloudBurst and Deployit as a way of showing how you can leverage the WebSphere CloudBurst command line interface and script packages to integrate cloud deployment with your application deployment automation solution.

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