About the Centralized Policy Agent Configuration

The Centralized Policy Agent Configuration is new in OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0. This feature provides a policy agent interface for managing multiple policy agent configurations from a single, centralized place. The policy agent configurations are stored in the OpenSSO Enterprise data store. A policy agent administrator can use either the OpenSSO Enterprise command-line interface (CLI), or the administration console to manage stored data.

Most policy agent configuration changes are conveyed to the participating policy agents without requiring the policy agents to be restarted. The policy agents respond to the changes based on the nature of the updated properties.

In the Centralized Policy Agent Configuration, policy agent configurations are separated into two sets. One set contains a few policy agent properties that are absolutely required for the policy agent start and to initialize itself properly. A file that contains these properties remains at the local host on which the policy agent is installed. This properties file acts as bootstrapping file for the policy agent.

The other set of policy agent configurations contains all remaining agent configuration properties. These configuration properties are stored either at the local policy agent host, or at a centralized data store managed by the OpenSSO Enterprisebased on the agent configuration repository type.

You can configure OpenSSO Enterprise to store policy agent configurations in a local repository or in a remote repository. A local policy agent configuration repository is a property file that contains all the policy agent configuration data. This option is supported for backward compatibility with legacy deployments. A remote policy agent configuration repository is the newer, more efficient option. When the policy agent configuration is stored in a remote, centralized data store managed by the OpenSSO Enterprise server, during server startup, the policy agent reads the bootstrapping file first to initialize itself. Then the policy agent makes an attribute service request to the OpenSSO Enterprise server to retrieve the policy agent configuration. The policy agent configuration returned by the OpenSSO Enterprise server contains a property that determines the location of the policy agent configuration.

If the property value is centralized, the policy agent uses the configuration just returned. If the property value is local, then the policy agent retrieves the remaining configuration properties from the local policy agent configuration repository and performs its functions accordingly.

The policy agent configuration must be totally stored in either a remote repository or a local repository. Mixed configurations are not supported.