Administrative agent
An administrative agent provides a single interface to administer multiple unfederated application server nodes in environments such as development, unit test or that portion of a server farm residings on a single machine.
The administrative agent and appservers must be on the same machine. We can connect to the machine from a browser or wsadmin on another machine.
Multiple customers administer application servers in their development, test, and production environments by federating the appserver nodes into a cell and administering the application servers from the dmgr. However, if we have development and unit test environments, then we might prefer to run appservers whose nodes have not been federated. These appservers have some administrative disadvantages. The appservers lack a common admin interface. Remote administration is limited to installing applications and changing application server configurations. As an alternative, we can register these application servers with an administrative agent to administer appservers from a single interface and to more fully administer appservers remotely.
We can register an appserver node with the administrative agent or federate the node with a deployment manager, but not both.
An administrative agent can monitor and control multiple appservers on one or more nodes. Use the appservers only to run the applications. By using a single interface to administer the appservers, you reduce the overhead of running admin services in every appserver.
Use the administrative agent to...
- Remotely install applications
- Change appserver configurations
- Stop and restart appservers
- Create additional appservers
Example topology of multiple appservers managed by an administrative agent
The following example topology shows machine A with an administrative agent and two appservers, Profile01 and Profile 02, that are registered with the administrative agent. The appservers on machine A each communicate with a remote Web server on machine B through the Web server plug-in. Firewalls provide additional security for the machines. Read the topic on planning to install WAS for further information on the topology.
Administrative jobs for appservers registered to an administrative agent and for dmgrs
Use a job manager to submit administrative jobs asynchronously for appservers registered to an administrative agent and for deployment managers. To make appservers registered to an administrative agent and dmgrs known to the job manager, register them with the job manager. Many of the management tasks that we can perform with the job manager are tasks that we can already perform with WAS ND, such as application management, server management, and node management. However, with the job manager, we can aggregate tasks and perform those tasks across multiple appservers or dmgrs.
Related concepts
Job manager
Related tasks
Set up the admin architectureCreate a management profile with an administrative agent
Administer nodes using the administrative agent
Related
registerNodederegisterNode