Oracle Corporation has released the Latest version Weblogic server 12c (12.1.2).
Oracle WebLogic Server 12c is the industry's best application server for building and deploying enterprise Java EE applications with support for new features for lowering cost of operations, improving performance, enhancing scalability and supporting the Oracle Applications portfolio.
WebLogic Server Java EE applications are based on standardized, modular components. WebLogic Server provides a complete set of services for those modules and handles many details of application behavior automatically, without requiring programming.
For beginners, some of the basic terms used related to Oracle WebLogic Server are mentioned below,
Domain
Domain is a group of weblogic server resources like admin server, managed server, jms, connection pool, data sources etc or whatever the resource you know of weblogic server since domain is the basic unit you have to create after installation and everything created and configured under a domain.
It can be possible to create multiple domains from a single installation and each domain has it's own resources but this is recommended only on development environment where you may want to test different applications or different customer applications on different domain. All domains are independent of each other.
Admin Server & Admin Console
Admin server is a central unit which is used to configure and monitor a domain resources. it provides a browser or GUI based console called admin console for configuration and monitoring of the domain resources.
Admin server is also a server instance which have all the capabilities just like we have on managed servers ( see next post for managed server ) but since it's a central repository for the domain configuration so it's not recommended to used it as a managed server but you can use it as a managed server on non production environments for testing purpose.
Managed Server
A managed server is an instance of weblogic server which is used to host ( deploy in terms of weblogic ) your applications and associate other domain resources with that. For example you create and deploy jar, ear, ear etc files and deploy on managed servers and after that create connnection pools, data source and associated with your managed server to let your application connect and get connection from database.
When you start a managed server it connects to admin server to get configuration and other deployment settings.
A domain can have multiple managed servers ( no upper limit of managed servers, you can create as many as you want only considering your hardware configuration ). They all can be independent servers or can be grouped into cluster to get scalability, availability, maintainability etc.
Machine
A machine is a logical representation of the physical machine (computer) that hosts one or more WebLogic Server instances. or in a simple word you can say Machine is a host on which your weblogic server is running. When you create and configure a machine you need to configure node manager and for that you need to define the host on which your node manager is running (actual host or called machine ) as well as node manager port ( see below for node manager )
Node Manager
Node Manager is a Java utility or service which runs as a separate process from WebLogic Server and allows you to perform common operations tasks related with Managed Servers regardless of its location with respect to its Administration Server.
Use of Node Manager is optional but it provides valuable benefits if your WebLogic Server environment hosts applications with high
Node manager is used to start or stop remote managed servers, remote managed servers means the servers distributed or configured on different machines or host, like In case of production where we ran multiple managed servers across different hosts in a single domain to get high availability, in that case all servers are distributed across multiple hosts however control via single admin console. make sure you have node manager running on each host and a machine configured via admin console for each host and respective managed server(s) associated with respective machine.
It provides the capability to auto health checking of managed servers and restart it automatically in case any server goes down.
Note :- Node manager is a independent java based utility which has not any dependency on weblogic or vice versa, so in case your node manager goes down there is no impact on your weblogic server running instances.
Cluster
Cluster is a group of manager servers work together to achieve high availability, scalability and for lots of other benefits. It appears to client as a single instance. All clustered servers can be on same or distributed across difference machines ( but in same cluster and domain ).
Use of cluster provides the benefits of scalability, maintainability, high availability, load balancing, failover capabilities etc.
For more details on Oracle weblogic server 12c please visit, http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/overview/index.html
