Portlet deployment in clustered environment

If your WebSphere Portal server is installed on top of WAS ND or WAS XD, which most probably would be the case in non development environment then deployment of portlet would be little different than how you work on DEV environment.

When you deploy portlet on cluster using Portal Admin Console or XMLAccess first changes would be made in the portal database and then the portal server would forward control to Deployment manager which will push changes to all the servers in that portal once the changes are copied to all the nodes the portlet should be activated.

In case of clustered environment follow this procedure for either installing or updating the portal.

1. Deploy your portlets using either the WebSphere Portal Administration page or the XML configuration interface utility (xmlaccess command).


2. Activate the deployed portlets in the cluster by running the "WPSconfig.bat activate-portlets" command. In addition to activating the portlets, this step causes the deployment manager to synchronize the changes across the cluster members.

Second approach of installing portlets would be to first install it as Enterprise application using WAS and then allow DMGR to synchronize changes to all the nodes once that is done then inform Portal server about the portlet using XMLAccess pre deployed command. This approach is useful when you want to combine your portlet with other resources such as EJB, Web Services or other web modules. Follow these steps for deploying portlet

1. Install the EAR through Deployment Manager, using either the Applications > Install New Application option within the Administration Console, or the AdminApp install command within the wsadmin scripting client


2. Map the application to each cluster where it is to run, using either the MapModulesToServers option of the AdminApp install command within the wsadmin scripting client, or the Map modules to servers option under that application’s entry under Applications > Enterprise Applications .


3. Synchronize the new application with each node in all clusters, and start the application in each cluster. By default, synchronization will automatically occur with each node hosting servers and cluster members, or both, to which the enterprise application is mapped.


4. Use the XMLAccess application to import a portlet definition into each portal cluster using the predeployed attribute, where the element of the points to the binaries directory where the portlet application's WAR contents are contained. Choose only one cluster member in a cluster against which to run the XMLAccess import, and as a result all cluster members receive the update.