You can use the WebSphere plug-in with an Apache web server to route HTTP requests to
applications that run in Liberty servers.
Before you begin
It is common to provide workload balancing and failover of application requests by running
the same application in multiple application server processes, a pattern referred to as an
application cluster. In such a topology, the web server plug-in must share the requests across all
the application servers in the cluster, and it can be directed to do so by using a configuration
that contains information about all of the application servers. This configuration is known as a
merged plug-in configuration because it involves merging routing information from multiple
application servers.
About this task
Liberty offers three ways to provide the
merged plug-in configuration to the web server. Choose one of the following ways.
Procedure
-
Create the plug-in configuration for each application server, use a utility to merge these
configurations into a single file, and then copy the file to the web server installation. This
method can be used for Liberty servers from
any edition of WebSphere; the servers do not need to be managed in a Liberty collective.
-
Manage the application server in a Liberty collective, and use the Dynamic Routing feature in the collective controller process to provide
the information from each application server to the web server plug-in. For this method, the web
server plug-in configuration only must contain information about the collective controller process;
the plug-in then contacts the controller to obtain information about all the servers in the
collective, and directs HTTP requests to all of the applications in all the application servers.
This method requires a multiple-server product such as WebSphere® Application Server Network Deployment Liberty or WebSphere Application Server for z/OS® Liberty for the collective controller host.
However, the application servers that run the applications can be from any WebSphere edition.
-
Organize the application servers into managed clusters within a Liberty collective, with the clusterMember
feature in each server. Then, use either the pluginUtility command or the
ClusterManager MBean in the controller process to generate a merged plug-in configuration for all
the servers in a cluster. This method requires a multiple-server product such as WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment Liberty or WebSphere Application Server for z/OS Liberty for all the Liberty servers.