WebSphere XD Virtual Enterprise 6.1.1 Announced

IBM Announced XD 6.1.1 last week. This is a refresh pack rather than a fix pack (note the 3rd digit change). You need to be at WAS 6.1.0.25 or 7.0.0.5 before upgrading. The FTP site for the refresh pack CIM is here.

New features include:

• AIX Micro-partitioning uncapped shared processor support enables Virtual Enterprise to operate in virtualized AIX server environments running AIX 5.3 and AIX 6.1 on POWER5 and POWER6 architectures. Virtual Enterprise recognizes the use of shared processor partitions, as well as the dynamic capacity of the shared processor pool on the physical hardware, to enable intelligent routing, prioritization, and application infrastructure virtualization in such AIX environments. For more information, see Virtualization and WebSphere Virtual Enterprise.
• A new bulletin board service overlay network (BBSON) separates Virtual Enterprise from high availability manager core groups. By enabling BBSON, you can run the product in new cells without having to configure and manage core groups and bridges. Note: All nodes must run at a version level of 6.1.1.0 or higher, and must be explicitly enabled with the useWVEBB.py script. See BBSON bulletin board for more information.

WebSphere Extended Deployment Compute Grid Version 6.1.1 includes the following new features:

• Quick parallelization with the built-in parameterizer allows you to parallelize batch jobs declaratively through the job definition (xJCL) without implementing the parallel job manager (PJM) System Programming Interface (SPI) set.
• A new SPI deployment model enables multiple parallel applications to share the same parallel batch infrastructure easily. The PJM SPI implementation can be packaged with the parallel batch application and deployed as a shared library.
• With subjob submission pacing, you can now throttle the capacity consumed by individual parallel jobs. Use this feature to ensure a very large parallel job does not consume all the capacity of its jobclass, so that it can run with smaller parallel jobs of the same jobclass.
• Integration with IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager enables more efficient monitoring of batch applications, jobs, and job infrastructure.
• The high-speed native connector for external schedulers allows you to easily integrate with external workload schedulers and significantly reduces memory consumption.

Happy upgrading! If you are not using the Centralized Installation Manager (CIM) to roll this out, you are NOT getting your money’s worth!