An administrative agent provides a single interface to administer multiple application servers with stand-alone nodes in environments such as development, unit test, or that portion of a server farm that resides on a single machine.
The administrative agent and application servers must be on the same machine, but you can connect to the machine from a browser or the wsadmin tool on another machine.
If you were previously
running on Version 7.0.0.11 or earlier, and have an administrative
agent with a managed node that has mismatched products or versions,
when you apply Version 7.0.0.13 or later to the administrative agent,
that administrative agent will not be able to start the subsystem
for any mismatched nodes. You must update these nodes to have the
same products and versions as the administrative agents, restart
the servers on the node and then restart the administrative agent,
before the administrative agent can resume managing these registered
nodes
An administrative agent can monitor and control multiple application servers on one or more nodes. Use the application servers only to run your applications. By using a single interface to administer your application servers, you reduce the overhead of running administrative services in every application server.
You can use the administrative agent to install applications on application servers, change application server configurations, stop and restart application servers, and create additional application servers.
Example topology of multiple application servers managed by an administrative agent
The following example topology shows machine A with an administrative agent and two application servers, Profile01 and Profile02, that are registered with the administrative agent. The application servers on machine A each communicate with a remote Web server on machine B through the Web server plug-in. Firewalls provide additional security for the machines. Read the topic on planning to install WebSphere Application Server for further information on the topology.