What is the difference between a managed server and admin server in Weblogic parlance? What is the responsibility of both in a standard production environment?
P.S: As I understood from the docs the Admin servers' responsibility is to manage the resources in a domain(a logical grouping of a few managed servers and one Admin server) but what I am not clear about are a few examples of what kind of resources it is responsible for managing?
Answer
Weblogic defines the roles of Admin/Managed server as follows:
- Admin Server
- can be only one for a Domain, which works like a Central Configuration/Monitoring controller for the entire domain
- runs the console, where you can create new managed servers, define DataSources (DB connections), JMS queues, deploy apps to Managed Servers, etc.
- Managed Server
- additional WebLogic Server instances
- you deploy Web applications, EJBs, and other resources onto the Managed Servers and use the Administration Server for configuration and management purposes only. This is where you run your apps.
- Managed Servers can be grouped to clusters.
- one of the examples of a Managed Server is a server running SOA applications, like OSB or BPEL.
See e.g. Understanding WebLogic Server Domains.