Introduction to Administration

 

As the administrator of your organization's computing applications, you are responsible for setting up and running a system that is critical to your corporate mission. You must plan how to maximize the performance and reliability of your BEA WebLogic Enterprise or BEA Tuxedo systems, and then make it happen.

This topic includes the following sections:

• The Administrator's Job

• Roadmap for Your Responsibilities

• Planning Your Configuration

 

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The Administrator's Job

You are the person responsible for configuring and booting an application and then keeping it running smoothly. Your job can be viewed in two phases:

• During the "groundwork phase," you establish the foundation of your application by planning, designing, installing, and configuring your application with the BEA WebLogic Enterprise or BEA Tuxedo system. You also select a security scheme for your application.

  Most of the work you do during this phase is necessary only once. The exception to this rule is the configuration work: the BEA WebLogic Enterprise or BEA Tuxedo system allows you to reconfigure your application whenever necessary to maximize performance and reliability.

• During the "operational phase," you run the application, monitor it and reconfigure it when necessary. You also diagnose and correct run-time problems.

The remainder of this chapter lists the specific tasks you need to do during each phase.

The Groundwork Phase

During the this phase, you must do the tasks listed in Table 1-1.

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Table 1-1 Groundwork Phase Tasks

Plan		Collect information from the application designers, the programmers, and the business that will use the application. Use this information to configure your system.
Install		Set up your environment (including hardware and software), and install the BEA WebLogic Enterprise system and the application.
Configure	Your system	Set the parameters provided by the BEA WebLogic Enterprise system that govern how the components of your application will be used.
	Transactions	Add transactions functionality to your definitions of domains, machines, groups, interfaces, services, and any other required components of your application.
Implement	Security	Select and implement one or more methods provided by the BEA WebLogic Enterprise system for protecting your application and data.

Depending on your application, you may also need to set up the tasks listed in Table 1-2.

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Table 1-2 Additional Groundwork Phase Tasks

Distributed applications	Create distributed applications with the routing tools: factory-based routing in BEA WebLogic Enterprise applications and data-dependent routing in BEA Tuxedo applications.
Networked applications	Set up any networked applications.
BEA WebLogic Enterprise remote client applications	To support BEA WebLogic Enterprise remote client applications, configure an Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) Listener/Handler and modify the machine configuration.

Note: This guide provides instructions for all the tasks listed in Table 1-3, except installation. For installation instructions, see the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Installation Guide.

The Operational Phase

During the this phase, you must do the tasks listed in Table 1-4.

Table 1-3 Operational Phase Tasks

Start up	Boot your application.
Monitor	Log the activities, problems, and performance of your application and analyze the results regularly.
Troubleshoot	Identify and resolve problems as they occur.

Depending on your application, you may also have to do the following:

Table 1-4 Additional Operational Phase Tasks

Tune	Use techniques such as load balancing and prioritizing to maximize the performance of your application.
Migrate	Reassign primary responsibility for your application from your original MASTER machine to an alternate (BACKUP) machine when problems occur on the MASTER.
Dynamically modify	Change system parameters and the menu of services offered, when necessary, to meet the evolving needs of your customers.
Dynamically reconfigure	Redefine your application to reflect the addition of a component, such as a new machine or server.

Differences Between the BEA WebLogic Enterprise and BEA Tuxedo Systems

For the BEA WebLogic Enterprise system, the existing BEA Tuxedo administration facilities have been extended to support the administration of applications running within the context of the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Object Request Broker (ORB) and the BEA WebLogic Enterprise TP Framework.

The UBBCONFIG configuration file for BEA WebLogic Enterprise systems includes the following enhancements to support the configuration of client and server applications:

• The RESOURCES section is enhanced to provide application-wide defaults for the sizing of Bulletin Board tables.

• The MACHINES section is enhanced to allow the specification of processor-specific values for sizing of those tables.

• A new section, INTERFACES, is added to allow the specification of information about CORBA interfaces used by the application.

• The ROUTING section is enhanced to provide support for a different type of routing criteria used with BEA WebLogic Enterprise systems. Also, existing ROUTING sections that specify BEA Tuxedo data-dependent routing parameters continue to work without modification.

• In the BEA Tuxedo system, you configure workstation handlers and listeners for connections from client applications to server applications. From an administrative viewpoint, this task is similar in BEA WebLogic Enterprise systems.

  However, BEA WebLogic Enterprise systems use a different communications protocol to connect remote and foreign clients to BEA WebLogic Enterprise server applications. The protocol is the standard Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP). Instead of the BEA Tuxedo Workstation Handler (WSH) process and Workstation Listener (WSL) process, the BEA WebLogic Enterprise system calls its gateway processes the IIOP Handler (ISH) and the IIOP Listener (ISL). This results in a slight syntax difference, ISL instead of WSL, in the SERVERS section of each application's UBBCONFIG configuration file.

Overall, the administration tasks for the BEA WebLogic Enterprise and BEA Tuxedo systems are similar. There are a few principal differences between the systems, however, as follows:

• In both systems you use a routing criteria to distribute processing to specific server groups. The routing mechanism in a BEA WebLogic Enterprise system is known as factory-based routing. It is fundamentally different than the BEA Tuxedo data-dependent routing mechanism.

  In the BEA Tuxedo system, you can examine any FML field used for a service invocation to determine the data-dependent routing criteria. In BEA WebLogic Enterprise systems, the system designer must personally communicate to you the routing criteria of CORBA interfaces. For BEA WebLogic Enterprise systems, there is no service request message data or associated buffer information available for routing. This occurs because BEA WebLogic Enterprise routing is performed at the factory, not on a method invocation on the target CORBA object.

• You cannot dynamically advertise CORBA interfaces at run time. However, you can suspend or reactivate CORBA interfaces.

• No direct ACL control is provided for CORBA interfaces. No control over servants is provided at the administrative level. In the UBBCONFIG configuration file, the MANDATORY_ACL parameter to the SECURITY parameter is ignored.

Details on these differences and exceptions are provided in subsequent chapters of this document.

Note: The Management Information Base (MIB) defines the set of classes through which the fundamental aspects of an application can be configured and managed. The MIB classes provide an administrative programming interface to the BEA WebLogic Enterprise or BEA Tuxedo system.

The BEA Tuxedo Reference Manual includes, in the TM_MIB(5) section, reference material about the T_INTERFACE MIB class, T_IFQUEUE MIB class, and T_FACTORY MIB class. Those MIB classes were added for BEA WebLogic Enterprise.

An online version of the BEA Tuxedo Reference Manual is available on the BEA WebLogic Enterprise online documentation. At the online documentation Home page, click on Tuxedo Documentation in the left navigation bar. The Tuxedo ATMI topics page is displayed. Then click Reference in the left navigation bar. The BEA Tuxedo Reference Manual page is displayed.

See also the descriptions of the T_DOMAIN MIB class, T_MACHINE MIB class, T_SERVER MIB class, T_TRANSACTION MIB class, and T_ROUTING MIB class. These MIB classes were enhanced for BEA WebLogic Enterprise.

 

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Roadmap for Your Responsibilities

At the beginning of this chapter, we summarized your job responsibilities in two phases. For software descriptions and procedures that help you perform your work, refer to the appropriate documentation, as follows:

• During the groundwork phase, see the Installation Guide and Chapters 3 through 15 of this document.

• During the operational phase, see Chapters 16 through 23 of this document.

 

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Planning Your Configuration

As an administrator, you need to work with your system designers and application designers to understand how the administrative configuration of your application can support the requirements for it. In addition, you need to know the requirements of your customer: the business unit using the new software.

Before you can start configuring your system, you need answers to questions about the design of your application and about the server applications developed from that design, as defined in the following section.

Questions About the Design

The following questions may help you start the planning process:

• How many machines will be used?

• Will client applications reside on machines that are remote from the server applications?

• Which CORBA interfaces will your BEA WebLogic Enterprise client or server application use?

• What resource managers will the application use and where will they be located?

• What "open" strings will the resource managers need?

• What setup information will be needed for a database resource manager?

• Will transactions be distributed?

• What buffer types will be used?

• Will data be distributed across machines?

• Will factory-based routing be used in your BEA WebLogic Enterprise application?

• Will data-dependent routing be used in your BEA Tuxedo application?

• In what order of priority should interfaces in BEA WebLogic Enterprise applications or BEA Tuxedo services be available?

• For BEA WebLogic Enterprise systems, will the domain need an Interface Repository (IR) database? If so, will the domain benefit from having IR replicas, and how many IR server applications should be defined?

• What are the reliability requirements? Will redundant listener and handler ports be needed? Will replicated server applications be needed?

Questions About Server Applications

The following questions may help you focus on the issues related to your server application that need to be resolved in your plan:

• What are the names of the BEA WebLogic Enterprise interfaces or BEA Tuxedo services?

• Are there any conversational services (BEA Tuxedo system)?

• What resource managers do they access?

• What buffer types do they use?

As you start putting together a configuration plan, you will discover more questions to which you need answers.