How to create a horizontal WebSphere 7 cluster

Question

I have a WebLogic and Tomcat background and, when our group lost the WebSphere admin, became the natural person to take over WebSphere. My first real task is to take the two existing WebSphere installations and cluster 1 application between them.

Both installations have a single cell with 2 nodes. 1 node on each is for the deployment manager and the other node contains all the servers on the installation (1 server per application). I, apparently, cannot simply add a node or server from one installation to a cluster on the other, because the nodes and servers are already tied to that installation's (cell's?) deployment manager.

The logical step, to me, would be to create a node without a deployment manager. If I follow the instructions to create an unmanaged node (makes sense, right?), I cannot add a server (existing or new) to it.

Please help.

Answer 1

To cluster Servers, they must be running on Nodes which are "federated" into the same Cell. If you're interested in having all applications belong to a single Cell, you can use removeNode and addNode to move one of the Nodes over to the other Cell.

If, instead, you want to have some applications/servers on a machine belong to one Cell and others to another, I'm thinking you may need to create an additional WebSphere profile so that you can have multiple NodeAgents running on different ports on the same machine. But I'm not positive about this approach. I guess I'd encourage having a single Cell, but I don't know what cases you're addressing by having multiple Cells currently.