Planning considerations
Contents
- Portal environment planning
- Plan for backup and recovery
- Software that can be installed on the portal machine
Portal environment planning
- Prepare for development environments
Development environments can be distributed on Developer desktops. Most WebSphere Portal v5.x developers use Rational Application Developer
- Prepare for a test environment
The test environment should mimic the intended production environment, including the platform and operating system levels. The test environment should imitate the type of traffic and load that is expected against the production environment. Promotion of applications from development to test and from test to production needs to be tightly managed for quality assurance and version control.
- Prepare for a production environment
- The production environment should be designed for redundancy and failover and workload distribution.
- The capacity of the entire environment should be greater than the intended use so that individual servers can be taken out of production without affecting application availability.
- To ensure that all of the system resources are available for the portal, production systems should be dedicated to the portal and should not run any other server software that is not related to the portal.
- Prepare for security
Choose one of the following topologies...
- LDAP directory
- LDAP directory + Lookaside database
- Member Manager database-only configuration
- Custom user registry for authentication.
- External manager security software
Plan for backup and recovery
Choose a backup and recovery scheme that is the most efficient for the operating system, and use it to back up every server, including the WebSphere Portal production machine, and any development servers. Note the following:
- Run database and LDAP servers remotely from the portal servers and back them up frequently. The database server should have nightly backups performed on the operating system, but if the database product provides a backup scheme, it is beneficial to use it as well.
Consider having redundant LDAP and database servers running which are actively synchronized with the primary servers. In case of a catastrophic failure, the portal servers can be simply reconfigured to use these backup servers.
- Back up and restore the configuration
The WebSphere Portal v5.x configuration is stored as a series of XML files. Use commands to create a backup copy of the configuration and to restore it. You can use these commands in the event that you want to preserve the configuration, for example, before making major configuration changes. For example...
tar cvf portalbackup.tar `find $Portal_Home -name \*.xml -print`
Software that can be installed on the portal machine
Here are three commands you can issue to determine if the system's software is at the recommended level:
GO LICPGM Display all the installed licensed programs wrkptfgrp Display and allow you to work with all installed PTF groups dspptf Display PTF status; for example, temporarily or permanently applied The following table lists software that you can use with WebSphere Portal.
Software Required? Description Recommendation Operating system Yes V5R2 is required to use WebSphere Portal - Express for iSeries. The iSeries server must be in an unrestricted state, and the user profile should be user type (user class) *SECOFR and have a value of *USRCLS for special authority.
5722SS1 OS/400 V5R2 Development Toolkit for Java Yes Necessary for Java development. 5722JV1 (Option 5) Dev Toolkit for Java (Version 1.3) Host servers Yes Required for remote installation. 5733SS1 (Option 12) Host Servers QShell interpreter Yes Required for local installation and to use scripts in WAS.
5722SS1 (Option 30) QShell Interpreter Application environment Yes
5722SS1 (Option 33) Portable Application Solution Environment (PASE) HTTP server Yes Not needed for installation, but required to support requests for servlets and JSP resources that you want to be handled by an HTTP server residing natively on iSeries. If you plan to deploy only enterprise beans, it is not needed. 5722DG1 IBM HTTP Server for iSeries
5769LNT Lotus Domino for AS/400 R5
5733LD6 Lotus Domino for iSeries 6.0TCP/IP Yes Required for TCP/IP. 5722TC1 TCP/IP Utilities Application server Yes WAS and WebSphere Portal must be installed on the same machine. 5733WS5 WAS V5 BASE Application server - Client Yes Necessary for client development and run time. 5733WS5 (Option 1) WAS Client development and run time Application server - Run time Yes Necessary for application server run time. 5733WS5 (Option 2 ) WAS run time Application server - Enablement Yes Necessary for Enterprise enablement. 5733WS5 (Option 10) WAS v5.0 Enterprise Enablement iSeries tools Yes Necessary for iSeries 5799PTL iSeries Tools for Developers PRPQ (or VNC equivalent) Database Yes
OS/400 DB/2 comes natively with iSeries Network deployment No Not required for installation. 5733WS5 (Option 5) WAS V5.0 Network Deployment Digital Certificate Manager No Not required for installation, but required if you plan to use SSL protocol. 5722SS1 (Option 34) Digital Certificate Manager Cryptographic Access Provider No Not required for installation, but required if you plan to use SSL. 5722AC2 or 5722AC3 Crypto (Refer to WAS) Query Manager and SQL development kits No Can be helpful in developing client applications. 5722ST1 DB2 Query Manager and SQL Development Kit
See also