BBSON bulletin board

Intelligent Management offers a bulletin board service overlay network (BBSON) independent of the WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment high availability manager. The high availability manager provides a mechanism that allows servers to exchange state data. This mechanism is commonly referred to as the bulletin board.

Overview

BBSON, which is enabled by default, alleviates the Intelligent Management dependency on the WAS Network Deployment high availability manager. BBSON is only used by the Intelligent Management components; other components continue to use the WAS Network Deployment high availability manager. By using BBSON you avoid constructing and managing core groups and bridges required for Intelligent Management. Use BBSON for new cells bridged to existing cells running WebSphere Virtual Enterprise v7.0 or later versions. For configuration information about the WAS Network Deployment high availability manager, see the topic on setting up a high availability environment.

Troubleshoot

For problem diagnosis and debugging purposes, use the manageBBSON.py script to collect BBSON state dumps from every process in the product cell. See the manageBBSON.py script.

For transitioning users: The WebSphere Virtual Enterprise command that equates to manageBBSON.py is manageWVEBB.py. If we are making the transition from WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, we can continue to use the manageWVEBB.py command, which operates the same as the manageBBSON.py command.trns

Restrictions

The following restrictions apply when using BBSON:

• Do not use BBSON if we have an older version than WebSphere Virtual Enterprise 7.0 in the cell.

Subtopics

• useBBSON.py script
  Intelligent Management uses the bulletin board service overlay network (BBSON) by default, which alleviates the dependency on the WAS Network Deployment (ND) high availability manager and its required core group configuration. Run useBBSON.py to disable the usage of BBSON, enabling the ND high availability manager instead. We can also use the script to enable BBSON if it was previously disabled.
• manageBBSON.py script
  Use the manageBBSON.py script to gather the BBSON bulletin board usage statistics, and periodically dump BBSON states. The statistics are available in the standard output and trace log files.

Related:

Core groups (high availability domains)

Set up a high availability environment

Create a new core group (high availability domain)

manageBBSON.py script