Program guide > (deprecated) Partitioning facility > Manage the partitioning facility environment > General cluster and WPF management considerations

Deprecated feature: The partitioning facility (WPF) feature is deprecated. You can configure partitioning with WebSphere eXtreme Scale.

Conservative partition design

The number of partitions in a specific solution should be managed carefully. When possible, fewer partitions are generally simpler and more efficient. Each partition takes system resources to implement within Workload Management: additional administrator effort, from a system management standpoint; and a reduction in cluster performance when tracking, from a performance monitoring perspective.

As a solution requires more partitions, each of these begins to scale and require either additional resources and/or additional performance to maintain. Some solutions are complicated and may need larger number of partitions, or even creating two or three different types of partitions to be more efficient (see hybrid partition versus a key application server solution); in these cases carefully manage the solution. Possibly, you could dynamically create partitions as they are needed and remove them when not required.

From an administrative standpoint, for example, often one of the more costly long term aspects of an implementation, managing several thousand partitions and the load placed against them in the cluster, is more challenging when compared to a solution requiring the management of hundreds of partitions. However, several solutions might require some thousands of partitions, and if so, the computing resources, developers and administrative resources to address the problem will be more extensive.

The partitioning facility has been tested with 10,000 partitions under load across several machines successfully. A key concern found during those tests was that the number of active coordinators must be at least four. Additionally, using the highly available (HA) manager policy to set these coordinators to specific physical machines in the cluster and setting preferred servers for the partitions to avoid these machines (or even application servers if you have a reduced number of machines) proved to be beneficial. In addition, when running large partition sets you might need to increase the Java™ Virtual Machine (JVM) heap sizes for the deployment manager and any application servers that you assign as active coordinators.

More details are provided in the management section, but in general, manage resources conservatively. This approach ensures that when performance spikes occur and failure conditions arise, the operational integrity of the cluster is not compromised.

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General cluster and WPF management considerations

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General cluster and WPF management considerations