Setting up a WebSphere 6.1 cluster to restart automatically

Starting with WebSphere 6.1, the node manager and servers are no longer automatically installed as Windows services. This actually can resolve a lot of headaches caused if the services start in the wrong sequence. However, in many situations you do want everything to restart automatically, especially if your production server gets rebooted in the middle of the night!

Here are the instructions to get the servers in a WebSphere cluster to recover automatically. We set these up on a Lotus Connections cluster and now system restarts go much smoother.

Setting up the WebSphere Node Manager as a Windows service

First, you need to set up the Node Manager on each physical server to run as a service and restart after a reboot:

1. Open a Command Window and go to the ..\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\bin directory
2. Type in the following command (adjusted for your install paths):
   

WASService -add "IBM WebSphere Node Agent" -servername nodeagent -profilePath D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01 -wasHome D:\IBM\Websphere\Appserver -logFile D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\logs\nodeagent\startNode.log -logRoot D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\logs\nodeagent -restart true -startType automatic

Setting up the member servers to automatically restart

Once the Node Manager is running as a service, you need to set the individual WebSphere servers to automatically restart using the following steps:

1. Log in to the Integrated Solutions Console
2. Navigate to Servers > Application servers > servername
3. Expand Java and Process Management and click on Monitoring Policy
4. Change the Node restart state to RUNNING
5. Click Apply
6. Click Save to save the master configuration
7. Repeat for each server in the cluster

Resources:

WebSphere InfoCenter: WASService Command
WebSphere InfoCenter: Monitoring Policy Settings
WebSphere World forum post on using WASService