General availability: Enabling IBM WebSphere Application Server on Azure Virtual Machines
Published date: May 25, 2021
This solution enables easy migration of WebSphere workloads to Azure by automating most of the boilerplate resource provisioning tasks to set up a highly available cluster of WebSphere servers on Azure Virtual Machines. The solution is part of a broader partnership between IBM and Microsoft to enable the WebSphere product portfolio on Azure. The partnership aims to cover a range of use cases from mission critical existing traditional workloads to cloud-native applications. Offers target Open Liberty on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), WebSphere Liberty on ARO, WebSphere Application Server on Virtual Machines, Open Liberty on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and WebSphere Liberty on AKS.
As part of the partnership, we previously released guidance for running WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on ARO. We also released guidance for running WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on AKS. Utilizing the current release, customers can easily set up a fully functional n-node WebSphere cluster including the Domain Manager and Console. The solution supports WebSphere 9.0.5 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3. The solution enables a variety of robust, production-ready deployment architectures. Once the initial provisioning is completed by the solution, you are free to further customize the deployment including integrating with more Azure services.
In the next few months, IBM and Microsoft are working on also providing jointly developed and supported Marketplace offerings targeting WebSphere Liberty/Open Liberty on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) as well as WebSphere Liberty/Open Liberty on AKS.
More details on the solution are available here. Customers are encouraged to evaluate the solution for full production usage, provide feedback and engage the team developing these solutions.