Configuration: Domains vs. Clusters

Question

I'm using WLS 6.0 to set up multiple environments (dev, QA, etc.).
I want to have multiple clusters running in each environment so
that we can test different code versions. Should I set up one domain
for each environment and then configure multiple clusters in the
single domain? Or, should I set up multiple domains in each environment
and have each domain control a single cluster and code version.
Any thoughts, recommendations, or advantages/disadvantages would
be very helpful.
Thanks,
Dave

Answer 1

Dave:
There is no direct answer to this question. While in production you want a
single point if administration for all servers and cluster that are running
in whole enterprise, what you should do in development, QA and how to
correlate them with production depends a lot on general practices that you
follow .
I would recommend that in development you don't even use admin/managed
server but each developer start their one server which is admin as well as
managed and use applications directory for auto-deployment etc etc. This
makes development easy and gives developer opportunity to change and test
application independent of other developers.
I think you should set up one admin server for your QA environment because
you also want to test the performance and other aspects of admin server in
an application that involves multiple clusters and multiple applications.
There could be different administrators for QA and production and you might
not want to have one admin server for QA and production for security
reasons.
However you have exact same hardware setup and file system and
configuration on QA and production machines, I see no reason why you can't
just take QA config.xml and use it in production, although you would be
required to change IP addresses for various options ( multicast, bind
address etc etc).
Then for production, you should have a single domain for all production
machines and all production applications enterprise wide.
Viresh Garg
Principal Developer Relations Engineer
BEA Systems
Dave wrote:
I'm using WLS 6.0 to set up multiple environments (dev, QA, etc.).
I want to have multiple clusters running in each environment so
that we can test different code versions. Should I set up one domain
for each environment and then configure multiple clusters in the
single domain? Or, should I set up multiple domains in each environment
and have each domain control a single cluster and code version.
Any thoughts, recommendations, or advantages/disadvantages would
be very helpful.
Thanks,
Dave