Chapter 14: WebSphere Administration

Download CD Content

In this chapter, we're going to cover the basic architecture of the middleware management facility built into the WebSphere Application Server and help you understand the role and mechanisms used for controlling the application server and the applications installed on it. We will walk you through the important tasks for setting up a network of one application server and of multiple application servers, for creating a cluster, and for managing your applications on that network of servers. We will discuss some of the key principles for problem detection, analysis, and configuration maintenance. This track will be presented exclusively through demonstrations of the user interface for the management facility.

Enterprise System Management

Before we begin, it is probably worth making one point clear. You may have noticed our use of the term middleware management. A fundamental tenet of WebSphere is to distinguish between middleware management and enterprise system management. Wherever you see unqualified references made to the term 'system management' within the context of WebSphere it is usually intended to mean middleware management. By that, we mean the facilities that are needed to manage the WebSphere middleware and the applications written to and hosted on the WebSphere Application Server.

The middleware management does not generally concern itself with managing peripheral devices, the operating system, other middleware environments, or even the data and system resources used by the applications hosted on WebSphere. At best, the WebSphere middleware management facility concerns itself with the relationships to these other things.

However, as we all know, an information system is composed of many more things than just the application server and the applications hosted on it. The application is really a composition of the client platform, including its operating system and browser, the network used to interconnect the client to the application server, the operating system on which the application server resides, the peripherals and file system it uses, other middleware integrated with the application server, underlying data systems, and so forth. Moreover, other applications hosted by other middleware facilities may often reside on the same computing facilities and so many resources will be shared between WebSphere and non-WebSphere environments.

We presume that enterprise system management is responsible for managing the entirety of the information system. In doing so, we presume the enterprise management system will collaborate with the middleware management facilities of WebSphere – delegating the responsibility for managing the configuration, interconnection, and operational properties of the WebSphere runtime and the applications (or application components) hosted on WebSphere in directions provided by the enterprise management system.

So, why does WebSphere have a middleware management facility at all? Why doesn't it just depend on enterprise management to solve all of its management requirements? The answer is centered on the relationship between the definition of a J2EE enterprise application, the resources it depends on, and the role of WebSphere to provide the best possible scalability and integrity for the applications hosted on it.

For example, WebSphere must have a deep understanding of the servers in a cluster, and the state of that cluster to manage the distribution of workload and recovery across the cluster. By extension, WebSphere must have a good understanding of the application and its resource dependencies. While you might imagine the enterprise management system provides this information to the WebSphere runtime, it is highly specialized to the J2EE model and largely outside the standard models used by the enterprise system for managing everything else. It has to be adjusted as often as the J2EE specification itself changes. It is just better if these relationships are maintained and managed by the middleware itself.

Besides, the separation between middleware management and enterprise management allows WebSphere to deliver an 'out-of-the-box' capability for managing the WebSphere system in simpler scenarios where you may be less concerned about integrating with an encompassing enterprise management system. For example, how often does it concern you that your developer desktop is not integrated into the overall management system of your enterprise? While enterprise management is a critical issue in production environments, most programmers would not be comfortable with having to turn to the central IT operations department in their enterprise to configure a unit test environment on their developer desktop.

WebSphere does have excellent facilities for integrating with the major enterprise management systems available on the market – including Tivoli's Monitor for Web Infrastructure (previously Tivoli Monitor for WebSphere), Computer Associates' Unicenter, Candle's Omegamon, Mercury Interactive's Topaz, Wiley Technology's Introscope, as well as several other vendors' products. A complete list of supported enterprise management products is listed here:

http://www-3.ibm.com/software/webservers/pw/dhtml/wsperformance/performance_bpsolutions.html.