WAS v8.5 > Set up the application serving environment > Administer application servers

Manage application servers

We can use either the dmgr console or command-line tools to manage the application servers.

If you plan to change the system clock, stop the application server first. After you stop the server, change the system clock, and then restart the server. If you change the system clock on one system, ensure the clocks on all systems that communicate with each other, and have the product installed, are synchronized. Otherwise, you might experience errors, such as security tokens no longer being valid. During the installation process, the product creates a default application server, named server1. If you create any additional application servers, we cannot start, stop, or manage these servers using the dmgr console associated with the original base server. You must either use command-line tools to perform these tasks for the additional servers, set up an dmgr console for each server, or configure an administrative agent to provide a single interface to all of your servers, including the original base server.

If you create additional application servers, only use one server to modify and save configurations. There is no coordination of configuration setting between the different servers and if you modify and save configurations on multiple servers, your data might become corrupted.

We can perform the following steps to view and manage the default application server from the dmgr console.

1. In the dmgr console click Servers > Server Types > WebSphere application servers.

   The Application servers page lists the application servers in the environment and the status of each of these servers. We can use this page to monitor the default server.

2. Click server1 to view or change the configuration settings for the default server.

   For example, if we do not need to have all of the sever components start during the server startup process, you might want to select Start components as needed, which is not selected when a new server is created. When this property is selected, server components are dynamically started as they are needed. Therefore, selecting this option can improve server startup time, and reduce the memory footprint of the server.

   Before selecting this option, verify that any other WebSphere products, that you are running in conjunction with this product, support this functionality.

3. Click Review, select Synchronize changes with Nodes.

4. Click Save to save any configuration changes made.

Results

When you click Servers > Server Types > WebSphere application servers, we can view the state of each server.

When you click Servers > Server Types > WebSphere application servers > server_name, we can view any configuration changes you made.

We can deploy applications or components to the application servers.

Subtopics

• Server page
  Use this topic to learn how to navigate within the dmgr console to the pages where we can view information about the application servers, generic servers, Java message service (JMS) servers, and web servers that are defined for the system.
• Application server settings
  Use this page to configure an application server or a cluster member template. An application server is a server that provides services required to run enterprise applications. A cluster member template is the set of application server configuration settings assigned to new members of a cluster.
• Environment entries page
  Use this page to view and manage arbitrary name-value pairs of data, where the name is a environment entry key and the value is a string value that can be used to set internal system configuration environment entries.
• Start an application server
  When you start an application server, a new server process starts. This new server process is based on the process definition settings of the current server configuration.
• Detecting and handling problems with runtime components
  You must monitor the status of runtime components to ensure that, once started, they remain operational as needed.
• Stop an application server
  Stop an application server ends a server process based on the process definition settings in the current application server configuration.
• Change time zone settings
  In some application environments, it is important that application server components use the same time zone. We can use the dmgr console or system environment variables to ensure the application components use the correct time zone.
• Web module or application server stops processing requests
  If an application server process spontaneously closes, or web modules stop responding to new requests, it is important that you quickly determine why this stoppage is occurring. We can use some of the following techniques to determine whether the problem is a web module problem or an application server environment problem.
• Server page
  Use this topic to learn how to navigate within the dmgr console to the pages where we can view information about the application servers, generic servers, Java message service (JMS) servers, and web servers that are defined for the system.
• Application server settings
  Use this page to configure an application server or a cluster member template. An application server is a server that provides services required to run enterprise applications. A cluster member template is the set of application server configuration settings assigned to new members of a cluster.
• Environment entries page
  Use this page to view and manage arbitrary name-value pairs of data, where the name is a environment entry key and the value is a string value that can be used to set internal system configuration environment entries.
• Start an application server
  When you start an application server, a new server process starts. This new server process is based on the process definition settings of the current server configuration.
• Directory conventions
  References in product information to app_server_root, profile_root, and other directories imply specific default directory locations. This article describes the conventions in use for WAS.
• Restart an application server in recovery mode
  When an application server instance with active transactions in progress restarts after a failure, the transaction service uses recovery logs to complete the recovery process. These logs, which each transactional resource maintains, are used to rerun any InDoubt transactions and return the overall system to a self-consistent state.
• Detecting and handling problems with runtime components
  You must monitor the status of runtime components to ensure that, once started, they remain operational as needed.
• Stop an application server
  Stop an application server ends a server process based on the process definition settings in the current application server configuration.
• Change time zone settings
  In some application environments, it is important that application server components use the same time zone. We can use the dmgr console or system environment variables to ensure the application components use the correct time zone.
• Web module or application server stops processing requests
  If an application server process spontaneously closes, or web modules stop responding to new requests, it is important that you quickly determine why this stoppage is occurring. We can use some of the following techniques to determine whether the problem is a web module problem or an application server environment problem.
• Prepare to host applications
  Rather than use the default application server provided with the product, we can configure a new server and set of resources.
• Configure an application server to use a single network interface
  Application servers, by default, are configured to use all of the network interfaces available for them to use. We can change this configuration such that an application server only uses a specific network interface. However, we cannot configure it to use a subgroup of interfaces. For example, if we have three ethernet adapters, we cannot configure an application server to use two of the three adapters.
• Configure application servers for UCS Transformation Format
  We can use the client.encoding.override=UTF-8 JVM argument to configure an application server for UCS Transformation Format. This format enables an application server to handle most character encodings, including specialized mathematical and technical symbols.

Related

Get started with wsadmin scripting
Hot deployment and dynamic reloading
Restart an application server in recovery mode

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