IBM WebSphere Application Server 8.0 Administration Guide: Learn to administer a reliable, secure, and scalable environment for running applications with WebSphere Application Server 8.0

Before beginning any WAS installation, it is recommended you answer the following three questions to help prepare and plan for an installation:

Before we start with the WebSphere Application Server installation, we need to ensure the correct installation media is available and that the operating system prerequisites have been met.

It is also important to ensure that there is enough free disk space on your filesystem, and that you also have a large enough folder or /tmp, c:/temp for Windows. A recommended size for the tmp folder is 1 Gigabyte; this will also cater for the deployment of large JEE applications. The installer program checks for required space before calling the WAS installation wizard and will inform you if there is not enough disk space; however, it is good to be prepared upfront to minimize such issues.

For our first installation, we are going to use the new IBM Installation Manager (IIM) in graphical mode to install and configure WAS. We will install WAS in two parts. Part 1 will be installation of the base binaries and part 2 will be an installation of an application server profile. In each part, we will list the actions as a set of steps. Later in the chapter, we will cover command-line installs often called silent installs.

To test our application server is functioning correctly, we will log in to the administration console. The administration console is a web application, which is used to configure the WebSphere Application Server. You can use it to perform tasks such as:

Currently, the application server is in a stopped state. Before we can log in to the admin console, we must start the newly created application server. To start the application server, we can use a special command script. Command scripts are found in the <was_profile_root> directory.

There are two scripts...

Before we move on and cover how to do a silent (no GUI) installation of WAS, we need to cover how to uninstall WAS. It is important to know how to uninstall WAS correctly because if you don't, residual folders and files can be left behind. If you try to install WAS over an existing WAS installation, the wizard will exit in error. So if you purposely want to re-install again into the same folder path, you need to ensure that WAS is removed correctly before you do so.

What we will do is remove the installation we created earlier and then re-create the same setup using a command-line based silent installation.

First we need to stop the WAS process using the stop server command located in the following folder <was_root>/<profile_root>/bin

So far, we have covered using the GUI approach to install WAS. The IIM installation process can also be run silently in headless mode. By using special response files, we can preset installation settings which do not require any user input.

Using response files is the technique used in automatic installations where servers are built to a known standard and naming convention. This ensures that each new WAS is installed exactly the same way each time. This is critical for production environments to ensure each server is configured the same way. This lends to easier support and fewer errors are introduced into environments, which is a key factor in supporting production systems. Another vital reason to use silent installations is that some organizations do not install X11 on production servers for security reasons.

Now we have installed WAS silently, we need to cover how to create profiles using the profile management command-line script. The script is located in the <was_root>/bin folder with the following name:

The following table explains the valid command-line modes for the manageprofiles script:

In this chapter, we covered how to install an application server and learned that there are different optional installation scenarios. Depending on requirements, there are multiple ways to install WAS.

The manual techniques shown previously have given a cross-section of possible install variations and demonstrated how flexible the installation process is. We also covered the ability to use a silent installation by using a response file that is used to direct IIM for silent installs. Silent installs dramatically speed up an installation. When installations are frequent, a response file approach ensures less installation errors due to the fact that it requires no human intervention. Once configured and tested, they can be run again and again without introducing errors that are often introduced when information needs to be typed into fields as required by a GUI-like IIM.

We were also introduced to a few command-line scripts such as start, stop, and other commands to manage profiles. We...