AIXπ

Hendrik works at the software lab services at Hursley and this is the second time I’ve attended to one of his sessions, last time was in Atlanta 2006. The session was mainly focused on how high availability works within WAS and how you would deploy high available applications in your environment. HA compared to WLM (Work Load Management), the HTTP Server Plugin does not provide smart WLM which should be taken in consideration when planning an environment for WLM.

One interesting field was the topic on how to handle the situation when a not HA enabled Deployment Manager gets corrupted or unavailable. To be able to accomplish this you should take backups of the configuration on a regular basis using the backupConfig command, to restore the configuration the command restoreConfig should be used. The path of restoring an unavailable Deployment Manager on another host could be looking something like:

1.Backup your DMGR on a regular basis using backupConfig
2.Re-install the WAS product to the backup server to the exactly same location as the corrupt one
3.Restore your DMGR configuration using the restoreConfig command
4.Change DNS entries to point to the new server

Hendrik presented a slide showing a WAS ND Cluster environment “Gold Design” (an infrastructure design setup assuming that money is not a problem) Very interesting and complex.

Another important design consideration when running clusters in two data centers either active/active or active/passive is to keep track on network latency. It is NOT recommended to run cells that span over two data centers due to network latency, you should run 2 cells, one in each data center instead.