Book Image

WebSphere Application Server 7.0 Administration Guide

By : Steve Robinson
Book Image

WebSphere Application Server 7.0 Administration Guide

By: Steve Robinson

Overview of this book

As an administrator you need a secure, scalable, resilient application infrastructure to support the developers building and managing J2EE applications and Service Oriented Architecture services. WebSphere application server, a product from IBM, is optimized to ease administration and improve runtime performance. It helps you run applications and services in a reliable, secure, and high-performance environment to ensure business opportunities are not lost due to application downtime. It's easy to get started and tame this powerful application server when you've got this book to hand. This administration guide will help you provide an innovative, performance-based foundation to build, run, and manage J2EE applications and SOA services, offering the highest level of reliability, security, and scalability. This book will take you through the different methods for installing WebSphere application server and demonstrate how to configure and prepare WebSphere resources for your application deployments. During configuration you will be shown how to administer your WebSphere server standalone or using the new administrative agent, which provides the ability to administer multiple installations of WebSphere application server using one single administration console. WebSphere security is covered in detail showing the various methods of implanting federated user and group repositories. The facets of data-aware and message-aware applications are explained and demonstrated giving the reader real-world examples of manual and automated deployments. Key administration features and tools are introduced, which will help a WebSphere administrator manage and tune their WebSphere implementation and application for success.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
WebSphere Application Server 7.0 Administration Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface

Admin console


To test our application server is functioning correctly, we will log in to the administration console. The administration console is a web application which is used to configure the WebSphere Application Server. You can use it to perform tasks such as:

  • Add, delete, start, and stop application servers

  • Deploy new applications to a server

  • Start and stop existing applications, and modify certain configurations

  • Add, delete, and edit resource providers

  • Configure security, including access to the administrative console

    • Details are covered in Chapter 3

  • Collect data for performance and troubleshooting purposes

    • Details are covered in Chapter 7

Currently, the application server is in a stopped state. Before we can log in to the admin console, we must start the newly created application server. To start the application server, we can use a special command script. Command scripts are found in the<was_root>/bin directory.

There are two scripts that we will use often throughout the book to start and stop WAS.

Script Name

Description

startServer.sh

Used to start a given application server. Usage: startServer.sh <servername>

stopServer.sh

Used to start a given application server. Usage: startServer.sh <servername>

To start our application server, we will use the startServer.sh command as follows:

<was_root>/bin/startServer.sh server1

Once you run the script, you will see the following output in your SSH session:

ADMU0116I: Tool information is being logged in file
/apps/was7/profiles/appsrv01/logs/server1/startServer.log
ADMU0128I: Starting tool with the appsrv01 profile
ADMU3100I: Reading configuration for server: server1
ADMU3200I: Server launched. Waiting for initialization status.
M

When the server has actually started, you will see an extra line mentioning that the server has started and its associated Unix Process ID (PID).

ADMU3000I: Server server1 open for e-business; process id is 3813

Now that the application server has started, we can navigate to the admin console URL. We can craft the URL as follows.

http://<hostname>:<port>/ibm/console

We have noted earlier that an important port to note was the admin_default port, which in our case is 9060. By using this port and the IP address of our server, we can access the admin console using a URL similar to the URL demonstrated below:

http://192.168.0.94:9060/ibm/console

Note

If we made a host-file modification on our desktop machine, we would be able to use a hostname or FQDN to access the admin console; for example, http://websphere.redhat.com:9060/ibm/console

If we were able to browse from the local machine where the application server was running, we could use http://localhost:9060/ibm/console.

When we navigate to the admin console URL, we see the following page:

During the installation, we opted to not turn on global security, and so we can log in using any username and no password is required. For the purpose of this book, we will log in as wasadmin as shown below:

Once logged in, we can see the administration console welcome screen and the main navigation panel on the left-hand side (LHS). Looking at the LHS panel shown in the following screenshot, we can see a list of all the configuration items, that is, features and resources that are available for WAS administration.

The administration panel provides a GUI that allows administrators to administer WAS. There is also an interactive command line interface called wsadmin.sh created for administering WAS without using the admin console. We will cover administrative scripting in Chapter 4.