Understanding Portal Server Components

A Portal Server deployment has a number of components that affect portal administration. These components include the following:

• Common agent container – a standalone Java program that implements a container for Java management applications. For more information, see Solaris 10 What's New.

• Portal Administration Server – a management application that performs authentication and access control check for users accessing Portal Server MBeans. This server uses a JMX^TM interface and is implemented as a common agent container module. A portal administration server instance runs on each host that the Portal Server product is installed.

• Portal domain repository – a hierarchical data store that contains information about how Portal Server MBeans are organized. Some Portal Server MBeans also store configuration data in this repository. The default Portal domain repository is a subtree in the same LDAP server that Access Manager uses.

  On stand-alone Gateway installations, communicating with the LDAP server from the Gateway is prohibited. An additional Portal domain repository on the Gateway file system is used to contain only local Gateway MBeans information.

• Portal data store – Back-end storage, such as a relational database management system (RDBMS) or LDAP server, or in the File System, for configuration data and other Portal Server resources that facilitate content delivery by a portal.

• Portal Administrative MBeans – Loaded by Portal administration server in the common agent container server to perform portal administrative tasks.

• Portal administration command-line interface (psadmin) – Provides administrative tools for various Portal Server components. For more information, see Using the psadmin Command-line Interface.

• Portal management console (psconsole) – Provides a browser interface for administering various portal server resources. For more information, see Using the Portal Server Management Console.

• Monitoring MBeans – Help capture Portal Server runtime resource information. For more information, see Chapter 7, Monitoring Portal Server Activity

• Local File System Data – Portal data stored in the local file system. The data includes configuration files, provider-based templates and JSP^TM syntax files, resource bundle files, and customized provider-based Java classes.

For more information about Portal Server components, see the Sun Java^TM System Portal Server 7.1 Deployment Planning Guide.