Why and when to perform this task
A node is a grouping of managed servers. To view information about and manage nodes, use the Nodes page. To access the Nodes page, click System Administration > Nodes in the console navigation tree.Steps for this task
For a node agent or deployment manager, use TCP or UDP.
A managed process uses multicast as its discovery protocol. The discovery protocol is fixed for a managed process. The main benefit of using multicast on managed processes is efficiency for the node agent. Suppose you have forty servers in a node. A node agent that uses multicast sends one broadcast to all forty servers. If a node agent did not use multicast, it would send discovery queries to all managed processes one at a time, totaling forty sends. Additional benefits of using multicast are that you do not have to configure the discovery port for each server or prevent port conflicts since all servers in one node listen to one port instead of to one port for each server.
On the Windows platform, multicast requires a router. If you run WebSphere Application Server on the Windows platform, but the machine the Application Server is on is not connected to the network, the multicast address is not shared with the application servers.
Clicking either button sends a request to the node agent for that node to perform a configuration synchronization immediately, instead of waiting for the periodic synchronization to occur. This is important if automatic configuration synchronization is disabled, or if the synchronization interval is set to a long time, and a configuration change has been made to the cell repository that needs to be replicated to that node. Settings for automatic synchronization are on the File Synchronization Service page.
Synchronize requests that a node synchronization operation be performed using the normal synchronization optimization algorithm. This operation is fast but might not fix problems from manual file edits that occur on the node. So it is still possible for the node and cell configuration to be out of synchronization after this operation is performed.
Full Resynchronize clears all synchronization optimization settings and performs configuration synchronization anew, so there will be no mismatch between node and cell configuration after this operation is performed. This operation can take longer than the Synchronize operation.