Enable cross-cell communication when you have a WebSphere® Extended
Deployment administrative cell that contains servers that are enabled with
on demand routers (ODR) that route to other WebSphere Application Server administrative
cells.
Before you begin
Configure the cells that need to communicate with each other and create
the on demand router.
About this task
Configure cross-cell communication when the ODR needs to route work
to servers that are in different cells by creating a core group bridge.
Procedure
- Start enough of the processes in each cell to capture all the nodes
that you want to participate in cross-cell communication, including the deployment
manager and node agents.
- Verify that the XD-CGB-EXPORT file is created for each cell.
The XD-CGB-EXPORT file is in the <install_root>/profiles/<deployment_manager_profile_name>/config/cells/<cell_name> directory. If you are using a firewall, verify that the firewall
is open for the ports that are listed in the XD-CGB-EXPORT file to support
communication.
- Run the crossCellCGBCfg command in each cell:
- From a command prompt, type the following command against the
ODR deployment manager process for each back-end cell to which the ODR cell
routes:
crossCellCGBCfg create <deployment_manager_host> <deployment_manager_SOAP_port> <path_to_external_cell_XD-CGB-EXPORT>
This command makes the ODR aware of the external cell that
is represented by the XD-CGB-EXPORT file. The XD-CGB-EXPORT file is a
subset of the serverindex.xml file that isolates the required endpoints
for cross cell high availability (HA) manager communication in a runtime environment.
If you examine the contents of the serverindex.xml file directly
or by way of the endpoint manager for a node agent in the administrative console,
the endpoint that is used by the cross cell function is P2P_CGBS_UNICAST_ADDRESS.
Any firewall that is employed between the ODR cell and the back-end cell needs
to allow the traffic to flow through the ports that are represented by this
endpoint on each node in the ODR and back-end cells.
- Run the crossCellCGBCfg command on each back-end cell, against
the deployment manager process of that cell, to import the XD-CGB-EXPORT file of
the ODR cell. It is not necessary or supported to import the files between
two back-end cells.
- Stop all of the processes in each cell.
- Restart each cell.
Results
The on demand router routes work to servers that are in different
cells.
Example
The
following illustration shows the logical division between two cells where
each cell is running several servers. Each node agent runs a peer access point
bridge between the cells, making the bridges part of a peer access point group.

What to do next
If you want to clear previous imports and start over, type
crossCellCGBCfg
clear <deployment_manager_host> <deployment_manager_SOAP_port>.
Or, if you want to have the cross cell communication utilize Secure Sockets
Layer (SSL), set the CGBS_USE_SSL system property to a non-null value on each
server in the ODR and back-end cells.
You can also
perform this task in the administrative console. See Configuring the core group bridge service for
more information.