Configuring IBM DevOps Deploy to connect to Traditional WebSphere Environments

Overview

Many users of IBM DevOps Deploy leverage features that have been purposefully built to integrate with traditional WebSphere environments.   This blog covers the initial steps to connect IBM DevOps Deploy with your WebSphere environment.

Here are the prerequisite steps:

1.     Install the DevOps Deploy Agent on your WebSphere Deployment Manager host.   It is a best practice to install the agent using the same WebSphere user account that was leveraged in the installation of WebSphere.

2.     Install the ‘WebSphere – Deployment’ automation plugin on your DevOps Deploy Server.   You can download the plugin from the Plugin Site at this location: 

https://urbancode.github.io/IBM-UCx-PLUGIN-DOCS/UCD/Websphere/

Once downloaded, in the Deploy web console, go to the Settings tab at the top of the page and then go to ‘Automation Plugins’ as shown below:  

Click the 'Load Plugin' button (as shown above) to browse to the plugin Zip file and click 'Submit' to complete the installation of the plugin.   You should see the plugin listed on the page as shown below:

With these prerequisites steps complete, we can now start the initial step to connect DevOps Deploy to your Traditional WebSphere environment.

Step 1 - Adding your new Agent to the Resource Tree

The first step needed to connect DevOps Deploy to your WebSphere cell is to add the Deploy Agent to the Resource Tree.   

Follow these steps:

1.        In your browser, connect to the DevOps Deploy web console.

2.        Click on the Resources Tab in the left-hand pane as shown below:

3.        Click the ‘Create Top-Level Group’ button as shown below:

4.        In the Create Resource dialog that appears, provide a name for your top-level group.  In my case, I entered “T-WAS” as shown below:

5.        Click Save

6.        The “T-WAS” node will appear in the tree.  Click the layer cake icon to the right as highlighted below:

7.        Select ‘Add Group’  from the pulldown menu that appears as shown below:

8.        In the dialog that appears, enter ‘DEV’ in the name field and click Save as shown below:

9.        Click the layer cake icon to the right next to the DEV environment as shown below:

10.  Click ‘Add Agent’ from the pulldown menu as shown above.

11.  In the Create Resource dialog that appears, select your Agent running on the WebSphere Deployment Manager from the pulldown.   In my case, it is “websphere855fp25.ibmcloud.private” as shown below:

12.  Click the Save button

13.  Your agent will be added under the DEV folder as shown below:

14.  Wait for about a minute and then click the Refresh link as shown above.   The DevOps Deploy Agent will detect that this server is a WebSphere Deployment Manager and it will automatically add children nodes under the agent.

15.  After refreshing the page, you should see some “WebSphereCell” children nodes as shown in the example below:

NOTE: it is important that it detects your Dmgr profile as shown above.   We need this to perform the discovery of your WebSphere cell.

If your WebSphere profiles appear in the Resource Tree (as shown above), you are finished and please skip to the next section.  

Otherwise, please follow the instructions below under ‘Troubleshooting – WebSphereCell child node does not appear’ found in the segment below.

Troubleshooting – WebSphereCell child nodes do not appear

If the “WebSphereCell” child nodes do not appear, this is likely because the WebSphere installation root directory is not pointed at the default location.   To resolve this, you need to set an agent property.    Follow the steps below:

1.        In the DevOps Deploy web console, click on Resources in the left-hand pane.

2.        Click on the Agents sub-tab (step 2 shown above)

3.        Locate your agent and click on the name text.  In my case, I clicked on “WAS855.ibmcloud.private”.

4.        Click on the “Configuration” sub-tab as shown below:

5.        Click on “User Defined Properties” in the left-hand pane

6.        Click the “Add Property” button as shown below:

7.     Add a property “websphere.profilePath” and specify the location of your WebSphere profile you want to work with.   We need to be able to work with the Dmgr profile to discover the topology of the cell in the next section.

For example: /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/Dmgr01.

NOTE: you could set this to “/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles” and it will find all the profiles under the parent path location.   Using the Agent property is one way to do this.   You could also set this property in a resource as a resource property and that would work as well.

8.        Click Save and the property is added as shown below:

9.      We now need to re-add the Agent to our Resource Tree.   Click on Resources in the left pane.

10.  Delete your existing agent from the Resource Tree found under the DEV folder by clicking the layer cake icon and selecting ‘Delete’ from the pulldown menu.  

11.  After you delete the agent, your resource tree should look like this:

12.  Add the agent again under the DEV folder in the tree.

13.  Click Refresh after waiting a minute.

14.  You should see the profile (or profiles) listed under the agent as shown below:

Once the WebSphereCell child nodes are visible, you can now move to Step 2 where we will configure the connection to the cell.

Step 2 – Configure the connection to your WebSphere cell and profile

We are now ready to set some properties for the profile that was discovered and that you plan to work with.  

NOTE: To discover the topology of the cell, we need to be able to see your Dmgr profile.   The cell discovery will be run against that profile.

Follow these steps to do configure properties to connect to your WebSphere deployment manager profile:

1.        In the DevOps Deploy web console, click on the Resources tab in the left-hand navigation.   This will take you to the Resource Tree.

2.        Click the layer cake icon to the right of the WebSphere profile that you will be working with.   In my case it is the “WebSphereCell – Dmgr01” profile as shown below (step 1):

3.        Click the Edit option from the pulldown menu that appears.

4.        The ‘Edit Resource’ dialog will appear.   Scroll down to the bottom of the dialog and click the ’10’ pulldown and change it to 25 as shown below:

5.        Scroll up and enter your “websphere.user” by typing the value in the field as shown below:

  In my case, the user is “wasadmin” as shown above.

6.        Scroll down and enter the “websphere.password” as shown below which will be the password for your websphere user that you entered above:

7.        Scroll up and enter a value for the “websphere.cell” property as shown below:

NOTE: you can find the cell name value in the WebSphere admin console as shown below.   Click on ‘System administration’ and then click ‘Cell’ to get the cell name:

8.        Click the Save button to save your changes.

You are now ready to move to the next step of discovery.

Step 3 – Run the discovery of the cell

To discover the topology of your cell, you must run this against your Dmgr profile.   Follow these steps as shown below:

1.        In the Resource Tree, click the layer cake icon to the right of the Dmgr profile as shown below:

2.        From the pulldown menu that appears, select the “Configure using WebSphere Topology Discovery” menu item as shown below:

3.        The topology discovery of your WebSphere cell will begin. 

4.        Review the output from the discovery as shown below.   If it is successfully, you should see JSON of what was discovered in the output:

5.        If there was a failure, view the output log to determine the cause of failure.  Sometimes it can be an incorrect user id or password that was used for authentication which results in a failure.    In other cases, make sure the SOAP port number is correct for your environment.

6.        If it was successful, scroll down to view the complete log.   You should see the nodes, servers, and clusters that were found by the discovery as shown in the example below:

7.        Click Close to close the dialog.

8.        In the Resource Tree view, click the ‘Refresh’ link or click refresh in your browser.

9.        You should now see your nodes, servers, and clusters appearing in the resource tree as shown below:

10.  Congratulations!   You have completed all the steps to connect DevOps Deploy to your WebSphere cell.

Conclusion

IBM DevOps Deploy has very intricate integrations with Traditional WebSphere environments which allow you to easily create repeatable, reliable deployment processes for your WebSphere applications.   The initial steps to configure the integration with a WebSphere Deployment Manager covered in this blog will set the stage for the next step of deployment.

In part 2 of this blog series, I will cover the application process for deployment and you will see how these initial configuration steps make that process easy.  You can easily deploy at the cluster or server scope with this configuration in place as resource properties are set to make the process simple.   You can also get out of the business of writing WebSphere python scripts as our "WebSphere - Deploy" plugin steps have all the scripts built-in to meet your deployment needs.