Weblogic Admin Server vs Managed Servers

14
votes

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?

3
weblogic
Also see stackoverflow.com/a/3887979/289396 - JoseK

3 Answers

27
votes

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.

1
votes

WebLogic Server Instance is a run time JVM and it is part of WebLogic Domain. First Server Instance is called as Administration Server and it is used for Administering the domain. Other Server Instances in a domain are called Managed Servers and they are used for hosting the deployed applications.

0
votes

Admin Server is for managing the administration options for the Weblogic instance hosted. All sorts of configurations which are central are all put up in the Admin Server. The start/stop script of Admin server is separate. You can start/stop Managed Server from the Admin Server console also.

Managed Server is used for deploying/starting/maintain Web Applications. The start/stop script of Managed Server is separate.

Both can run on the same hardware.