Overview

Sometimes you have to be able to improvise in life.   In this example, a Cheetah improvised to jump on a safari jeep in front of us to gain a better perspective of what was out in the Serengeti:

When integrating IBM DevOps Deploy with a Traditional WebSphere environment, you may need to improvise the way you authenticate to a WebSphere cell.   In this blog, I document how one can authenticate to a WebSphere cell using SOAP client properties file as opposed to entering the WebSphere username and password in the IBM DevOps Deploy resource tree.  

Some of our clients prefer this approach and this blog provides an example of the steps required to configure both WebSphere and IBM DevOps Deploy to work in this manner.

Prerequisites:

•             IBM DevOps Deploy Server Installation
•             Installation of the DevOps Deploy WebSphere – Deployment plugin
•             A Traditional WebSphere Deployment Manager installed on a Linux or Windows host.

For the purposes of this blog, I have a WebSphere 8.5.5 instance installed on a Linux host.

Configure WebSphere to pickup the WebSphere username and password from the soap.client.properties file

Follow these steps to input the WebSphere username and password on your WebSphere Deployment Manager host:

1.        Login to your WebSphere deployment manager host using ssh or other terminal connection methods.

2.        Change directory to <WASND_INSTALL_ROOT>/AppServer/profiles/Dmgr01/properties

# cd /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/Dmgr01/properties

3.        Make a backup of the soap.client.props file as shown above

# cp soap.client.props soap.client.props.backup

4.        Edit the soap.client.props and update the loginUserid and loginPassword properties as shown below on lines 31 and 32:

5.        Save your changes

6.        You have completed the necessary update to the WebSphere Deployment Manager.   We now will move to the DevOps Deploy web console to make the next set of updates.

Update the DevOps Deploy Resource Tree

With the WebSphere username and password configured in the soap.client.props file on the WebSphere Deployment Manager, we can now update our Resource Tree where we have discovered the topology of the WebSphere cell.

Follow these steps:

1.        Login to your IBM DevOps Deploy web console

2.        Click on the Resources tab found in the left-hand navigation as shown below:

3.        Navigate in your resource tree to find your WebSphere cell as shown below:

4.        Click the ‘three dots’ pulldown menu at the far right and select ‘Edit’ from the pulldown list as shown below.

5.        An Edit Resource dialog window will appears as shown below:

6.        Using the scrollbar, scroll down to the ‘websphere.user’ value as shown below and update the field so it has an empty string value (i.e. clear the value):

7.        Scroll down and clear the ‘websphere.password’ value so it is an empty value as well shown in the image above.

8.        Click Save.

With these changes completed, when a DevOps Deploy process executes to deploy a WebSphere application to an environment, our ‘WebSphere – Deployment’ plugin will recognize that the websphere.user and websphere.password fields are left blank in the Resource Tree.   It will then revert to the WebSphere soap.client.props file to get the websphere.username and websphere.password details to authenticate with the cell.

Testing a Deployment

When you execute a deployment to your WebSphere environment following the changes made above, you should be able to see it is using SOAP for the connection type as shown below:

Notice the ‘-conntype SOAP’ in the wsadmin.sh script execution above rather than trying to use username/password parameters.   This is why making sure in IBM DevOps Deploy that the websphere.user and websphere.password properties in the Resource Tree are empty strings as we configured earlier in the blog.

Conclusion

IBM DevOps Deploy can automate deployments to traditional WebSphere environments and the solution is very flexible to meet the needs of our many customers.   It can make a complex deployment use case easy to configure in the product using our built-in features.

In some cases, our clients prefer to use the soap.client.props to provide their authentication details when working with IBM DevOps Deploy.   Often, they will make sure the soap.client.props file is made very secure on the WebSphere deployment manager when they use this approach.

I hope you found this blog to be helpful.   Happy Deploying to all of our friends and customers!