WAS on AIX: under the hood
This chapter explains the structure and workings of JVM (JVM) and WAS, and describes how they interact with the underlying AIX platform. Understanding these topics will help you plan your deployment and tune your environment. Many IBM products run inside the application server environment, so the principles outlined here can be applied more generally to these, as well.
First the chapter explains why WAS is used and how it came about in its current 6.1 Version, followed by an examination of how it is laid out on disk (that is, the directory structures) after it is installed. Next, the high level WAS architecture is described and put into context within the wider operating system. Finally, an "under the hood" view examines how it all works, and looks at the three key "layer" that are essential to the current WAS 6.1 runtime environment:
Note that discussion of components higher up the stack (such as the Service Integration Bus and its default messaging provider engine, the Portlet Container, the Session Initiation Protocol Container, or any of the Web services support components) is beyond the scope of this publication, because they have no direct interaction with the underlying AIX and WebSphere platform boundary focused on in this book.