Deploying jazz.war on WebSphere Application Server for high availability environments

Deploy the jazz.war on both the primary and backup servers so that you can use idle standby as a strategy for failover in high availability environments.

The Idle Standby configuration enables recovery from failover to help ensure minimal impact on business operations during planned or unplanned server outages. To implement the idle standby configuration with IBM® Rational® Team Concert, you must have the Enterprise edition and WebSphere® Application Server. To implement the idle standby configuration with IBM Rational Quality Manager, you must have the Standard edition and WebSphere Application Server.

Key points

Before you decide to use the idle standby configuration, consider the following key points:
  • Jazz applications, such as Rational Team Concert and Rational Quality Manager, are licensed for use as single-server configurations and cannot be used in either a cloned or a clustered configuration, except if implemented in an idle standby configuration. In this configuration, you can activate a backup server if the primary server fails, or if maintenance needs to be performed on the primary server. Clustering for load balancing or anything other than implementing the idle standby configuration is currently not supported.
  • Idle standby configuration is not intended to provide complete support for failover. If the primary server fails or if it is intentionally taken offline, some users might need to authenticate to the Web again, or wait for their client to refresh a view.
  • The backup server is not intended to be run for extended periods in place of the primary server.
    Important: Rational Team Concert and Rational Quality Manager allow only a single server to be active at any one time to a repository; therefore, the backup (or Idle) server is configured to never run asynchronous (or background) tasks. If a switch is made to the backup server, you must plan to bring the primary server back up as quickly as possible.

Deployment topology

The following topology diagram illustrates the configuration for basic high availability when using idle standby. In the following figure, the IBM HTTP Server is used to direct incoming traffic to one of the two WebSphere Application Servers, Primary Server A or Backup Server B. The WebSphere servers represent a primary and secondary node in the cluster. They are both members of the same cluster cell. In addition to the WebSphere nodes, there is an LDAP server, a file server (for Lucene index), and a Database server.

Idle Standby - Server configuration

Requirements

The following table lists the basic high availability requirements:

Table 1. Basic high availability requirements
Server Software Operating system
IBM HTTP Server
  • IBM HTTP Server v6.1.0.17+
  • Web server plug-ins for WebSphere Application Server v6.1.0.17+
  • WebSphere maintenance package SDKPK85942
  • IBM Key Management v7.0.3.28
Windows®, Linux®
WebSphere Application Server Primary Server A
  • WebSphere Application Server v6.1.0.19
  • Rational Team Concert v2.0 - Enterprise edition or Rational Quality Manager Standard edition
Windows, Linux
WebSphere Application Server Backup Server B
  • WebSphere Application Server v6.1.0.19
  • Rational Team Concert v2.0 - Enterprise edition or Rational Quality Manager Standard edition
Windows, Linux
Optional - File Server, Shared Disk Lucene Index - full text index Windows, Linux

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