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

Installation planning


Before we begin any WebSphere installation, we would ask the three questions below to help prepare and plan for an installation.

  • What version of Websphere is required to support your applications?

    • Investigations are made to ensure that your application will run in the version of Websphere you intend to install. A key point is to understand what version of the Java WebSphere version support. You can go to the following URL to view a WebSphere version compatibility matrix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websphere. You may have to speak to your application developers or application vendors to accurately asses JVM requirements.

  • Are there any OS tweaks for the platform required for the chosen version of Websphere?

    • It is important to understand what version of OS you are going to use. First decide which platform you are going to install on and then research what the prerequisites are for that platform. Each platform may have certain Operating System (OS) changes or optimizations which are stipulated for correct installation of WAS.

  • What version of OS and fix packs are required to support the chosen version of WebSphere?

    • Not only do you need to understand the base installation version, you may also want to understand what the latest fix packs are to ensure that your version of Websphere is fully up-to-date. You can go to the following URL to find the latest WebSphere fix pack version: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg27004980#ver70. We will cover more about maintenance and fix packs in Chapter 10.

As mentioned above, we have chosen to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in this book, as it is the most commonly used IBM certified Linux distribution used for Websphere; however, it is recommended that you visit the following IBM URL and read up on the prerequisites for installing Websphere Application Server 7.0 on Linux platforms http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg27012369.

Installation scenarios

Before beginning an installation, it is advised that you think about the type of WAS install you wish to perform. There are several installation scenarios and knowing which components are available might influence your chosen installation path. You may also wish to think about coexistence or interoperability with other WAS implementations or helper services. Helper services are other applications and/or technologies that may be required for your applications to run correctly on WebSphere and function as per their design. This means you may have to consider installation requirements in addition to those of WAS.

The WAS installation process allows for two main actions. The first being the base binaries which are the core executables and the second being a profile. The base binaries are the product mechanics made up of executables and shells scripts, and can be shared by one or many profiles. Profiles exist so data can be partitioned away from the underlying core. Simply put, a profile contains an Application Server. When an Application Server is running, the server process may read and write data to underlying configuration files and logs. So, by using profiles, transient data is kept away from the base product. This allows us to have more than one profile using the same base binaries and also allows us to remove profiles without affecting other profiles. Another reason for separating the base binaries is so that we can upgrade the product with maintenance and fix packs without having to reconfigure our Application Server profiles. A conceptual diagram is shown below.

Profile types

During the installation process, you can decide to install different profile types. There are two main profile types: application server profile or a management profile. Your installation scenarios will determine which combination of profile types you will be selecting during the installation wizard. Below is a table explaining the different profile types:

Profile Type

Description

Application server

WebSphere has the ability to have multiple application server definitions using the same underlying base binaries. Each profile defines the attributes and configurations for a given application server.

Each standalone application server can optionally have its own administrative console application, which you use to manage the application server.

We will cover how to install a profile later in the chapter.

Management profile

A Management profile defines an administrative agent which provides a single interface (administrative console) to administer multiple application servers.

We will cover the administrative agent in Chapter 8.