What's New in Oracle Application Server Administration?

This preface introduces the new and changed administrative features of Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 (10.1.3). This information is mostly useful to users who have managed previous releases of Oracle Application Server, including Oracle Application Server 10g Release 1 (9.0.4) and 10g Release 2 (10.1.2).

New Features for 10g Release 3 (10.1.3)

The new administrative features of Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 (10.1.3) include:

• New features for Application Server Control Console:

  • Lightweight architecture. Now, Application Server Control is deployed as a standard J2EE application (ascontrol) that runs within every OC4J container you create.

  • Standards-based management. Application Server Control is based on the Java Management Extensions (JMX) technology.

  • Remote management. You can use a single instance of the Application Server Control to remotely manage all the instances in the cluster.

  • Role-based management. You can assign one of three standard administrative roles to each user.

  See Section 2.2.1, "Application Server Control New Features for 10g Release 3 (10.1.3)" for more information about these features.

• A new option for the opmnctl status command, which provides a list of ports used by Oracle Application Server. This replaces the portlist.ini file.

  See Section 1.4, "Task 3: Check Your Port Numbers" for more information.

• Changes in clustering

  • The Distributed Configuration Management (DCM) framework, used in prior releases of Oracle Application Server to replicate common configuration information across a cluster, is not included in the current release. This means that:

    • Configuration using the dcmctl command line utility or Application Server Control Console is no longer supported.

    • Cluster configurations must now be manually replicated in the opmn.xml file installed on each node within the cluster.

  • The ONS configuration file (ons.conf) is no longer used. ONS connection data is now set in the <notification-server> element within opmn.xml, the OPMN configuration file located in the Oracle_Home/opmn/conf directory on each node containing an OC4J or Oracle HTTP Server instance.

  • Each node is no longer required to be manually configured to connect to every other node in the cluster.

  • A new command, opmnassociate, and the new config topology option for the opmnctl command are provided to configure clustering.

  See Section 6.1, "Configuring Cluster Topologies" for more information.

• New commands for adding and deleting OC4J instances.

  See Section 6.2, "Adding and Deleting OC4J Instances" for more information.

• New procedures for configuring a 10g Release 3 (10.1.3) middle-tier instance to use a 10.1.2 or 9.0.4 OracleAS Infrastructure and for enabling SSO authentication.

  See Section 6.5, "Configuring Instances to Use 10.1.2 and 9.0.4 Oracle Identity Management" for more information.