Chapter 1. Prerequisites

Note

This release of Red Hat Middleware Management is a technical preview. Technology Previews provide early access to upcoming product innovations, letting you to test new features and provide feedback during the development process. Technology Preview releases are not intended for production use. For more information see the Red Hat Customer Portal.

This document provides instructions for installing Red Hat Middleware Management. The installation media is two Linux container images available from registry.access.redhat.com.

1.1. Architecture Overview

Installing the Red Hat Middleware Management solution involves installing the following components:

  • Middleware management server: A Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7 based application that collects metrics and events from middleware servers and sends that data to the CloudForms console. The middleware management server also executes operations on middleware servers. This is delivered as a Linux container image.
  • Cassandra datastore: Storage for middleware inventory and time series data. Only the middleware manager communicates with the metric store and it is not supported for any other use. This is delivered as a Linux container image.
  • Middleware management agent: You install an agent on each JBoss middleware instance to be managed. Once installed and enabled, the agent can push metrics and events to the middleware management server.
Note

The middleware manager JAR files are built using the Java Developer Kit version 8 (JDK8). If you are using a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that does not include JDK8 (versions before RHEL 7), you will need to upgrade your JDK to version 8 in order to run the middleware manager server and agents.

1.2. Installation Overview

Before you begin installing Red Hat Middleware Management, you should have the following information:

  • A non-root user to perform the middleware management server installation.
  • A user with permission to write to the Cassandra data store (used for ongoing operations). This can be the same non-root user who performs the installation.

The installation workflow is as follows:

  1. Install and configure Docker
  2. Install and configure the Cassandra datastore
  3. Install the Red Hat Middleware Management server
  4. Add the middleware provider to CloudForms
  5. Install the Red Hat Middleware Management agent on EAP servers
  6. (Optional) Add nodes to Cassandra

1.3. Installation Prerequisites

The installation instructions for the Red Hat Middleware Management server assume that you already have the following in place:

1.3.1. Installing and Configuring Docker

  1. Register your Linux machine and add the following repositories for Docker support. 

    subscription-manager register --username=<rhnuser> --password=<pwd>
subscription-manager list --available
subscription-manager attach --pool=<pool_id>
subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-extras-rpms

  2. Install Docker and the required dependencies. 

    yum install docker

  3. Start the Docker service. 

    systemctl start docker

  4. Enable the Docker service. 

    systemctl enable docker