Building the Infrastructure for the Production Environment

A domain , a logical group of servers, is the basic administrative unit for Weblogic Platform. In a project life cycle, typically you create separate domains for the development, testing, and production environments. Often a development domain consists of only one server, but testing and production environments have multiple servers, especially when you need load balancing and fail-over for your applications.

You can create the following types of domains:

• A basic WebLogic Server domain to deploy simple J2EE applications.

• A WebLogic Portal domain to deploy Portal applications. This domain includes the Portal framework.

• A WebLogic Integration domain to deploy workflow applications. This domain contains the workflow framework required to create business processes. The domain also allows data transformation features.

• A WebLogic Platform domain to deploy enterprise applications, which can include features such as Portal and Integration.

A server has a dedicated amount of memory and is an instance of the class weblogic.Server running within a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). There are two types of servers within a domain:

• The administration server is the central point of contact for administration and is responsible for maintaining the configuration file for the domain, config.xml . Console, the Web-based tool for configuring the domain, is accessible only through this administration server. It is also the keeper of a domain log file that contains information about all the servers in the domain. Shutting down the administration server has no effect on managed servers.

• Managed servers process client requests . The administration server manages them. A domain can have multiple independent managed servers that can be started on different machines. However, to achieve load balancing and fail-over for your application, you need to start these managed servers in a cluster. Servers in a cluster are always in synch to enable any server to handle client requests.