Creating session persistence to a data grid

To configure your WebSphere® Application Server application to use the appliance for session management, you can either select the appliance when you are installing a new application, or you can update your existing application or server settings to use the appliance.

Before you begin

Before you change the configuration in WebSphere Application Server, you must have:
  • Access to theWebSphere Application Server cell that you want to configure
  • The IP address or fully-qualified host name of the appliance
  • A User ID and password that you use to log in to the appliance user interface. To create a data cache, you must have data cache creation permissions.
  • WebSphere eXtreme Scale Client installed in your WebSphere Application Server configuration. See Installing WebSphere eXtreme Scale Client for more information.
  • Global security enabled in the WebSphere Application Server administrative console, if your appliance has transport layer security enabled or you want to ensure that clients use transport layer security. See Configuring Transport Layer Security (TLS) for more information.
  • Only sessions that use cookies as the session tracking mechanism can be saved to the data grid. You cannot persist sessions that use URL rewriting as a session tracking mechanism.

Procedure

Results

You configured HTTP session manager to persist the sessions to a data grid. Entries are removed from the data grid when the sessions time out. See Session management settings for more information about updating the session timeout value in the WebSphere Application Server administrative console.
CAUTION:
When you configure this scenario, the security credentials for the IBM WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance are automatically stored in the WebSphere Application Server configuration. If you change the credentials for the data grid after the initial configuration, the WebSphere Application Server no longer has the correct credentials. You can reset the credentials by applying the eXtreme Scale session management settings again.

What to do next

You can check the WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance user interface to see that your session data grid has been created and is receiving data.