Common Services TOMCAT and connecting multiple products

[Leo Cadegan]

Is anyone running the Common Services TOMCAT on the mainframe and able to successfully connect multiple products to it? For example, CA MAT, Intertest, Endevor, OPS/MVS.

I am having an extremely hard time understanding the documentation that would allow multiple connections to the one TOMCAT and understanding the configuration necessary to do so. I have a server up and running, but when trying to connect a product it gets very confusing as to what needs to go where.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

[Joseph Reilly]

Hello Leo,

I'm the product owner for Common Services for z/OS (CCS) Tomcat. You raise a valid question. The purpose of CCS Tomcat is have one Tomcat installation that can be used by multiple products so you don't have to install a separate Tomcat installation for each product. 

The next logical step is to have a single Tomcat instance host those multiple products. Unfortunately at this time the products require their own Tomcat instance. To get to the next step we need to test the configuration and running of multiple products in a single Tomcat instance. Some products may do special processing in Tomcat that make them incompatible with other products. 

Are you specifically interested in having the CA MAT, Intertest, Endevor and OPS/MVS web applications running in a single Tomcat instance? Let me know and I'll discuss with those product teams to see if it is possible.

Thanks!

Joe 

[Leo Cadegan]

I want to be able to use the GUI for MAT, Endevor, Intertest, OPS, OM Webviewer with as few started tasks as possible. This is what I thought the Common Services Tomcat provided. This seems to also be where this old mainframer gets confused with "their own Tomcat instance". Is an "instance" a started task? I thought it was as simple as copying a products war files to the Common Services Tomcat and viola. Then reading documentation, it doesn't seem to be that way? I'm just confused as to how this needs set up what goes where.

[Joseph Reilly]

Hi Leo,

I'm told that CA Mat, Intertest and FileMaster Plus may share a Tomcat instance so  I've asked someone that knows more about that to reply to you.  

 

When you install CCS Tomcat with SMP/E you get the Tomcat libraries for a specific Apache Tomcat release, e.g. the latest Apache Tomcat release that we packaged as CCS Tomcat for CCS 14.1 is 8.5.35. Before CCS Tomcat if you had 5 products that used Tomcat then you would have to install Tomcat 5 separate times. By installing CCS Tomcat you only have the one installation so when you need to upgrade Tomcat you only need to do one upgrade. 

But those are only the libraries and other files that can be shared. 

A CCS Tomcat instance is what is actually running, like you noted a separate address space or started task. Before you can run CCS Tomcat with a product web application you need to deploy the Tomcat libraries so you aren't running out of the SMP/E target libraries. Then for each separate instance you need to create a new file system to hold logs and other content that is unique to that instance. This is also when you deploy the web application so it's unique to that Tomcat instance. Below is a picture that I hope helps. 

In the JCL you configure CATALINA_HOME to point to the deployed libraries which have been copied from the SMP/E target library. CATALINA_BASE in turn points to the file system that is unique to this Tomcat instance. 

If you want we can talk on the phone about this and the concepts involved. However to get the best technical direction on actually setting this up I suggest opening a service cloud case under COMMON SERVICES where our technical support staff can help walk you through the setup. 

Thanks,

Joe 

[Leo Cadegan]

Yes this helps Joe and is very much appreciated. A phone call might answer my final questions and if that doesn't, as you said I can always open another case.

Thanks

Leo