This week we are going to focus on installing Tomcat on to cloud servers. Today we are going to take the easy route. We are going to use bitnami and look at timings of how long everything takes as well as the automatic configurations that it sets up. In previous lesions we talked about linking your cloud accounts to bitnami and will not repeat that instructions. For those that are new to public domain software, Tomcat is a public domain software package that allows you to host java applications similar to WebLogic. I won’t get in to a debate over which is better because we will be covering how to install WebLogic in a later blog. I will give you all the information that you need to make that decision of which is best for our company and implementation.
We login to our oracle.bitnami.com web site and verify our account credentials.
We want to launch a Tomcat server so we search for Tomcat and hover over the icon. When we hover over the icon the word Launch appears and we click on this button.
Once we click Launch we get the virtual machine configuration screen.
Things to note on this screen are
- the name is what you want to add to identify the virtual macine
- the cloud account identifies which data center, if it is metered or un-metered, and what shapes will be available to this virtual machine
- the network is automatically configured for ports 80 and 443 and enabled not only in the cloud network security configuration but in the operating system as well
- the operating system gives you the option but we default to OEL 6.7
- we could increase the disk size and select the memory/cpu option but it does not show us the cost because bitnami does not know if your account is metered or un-metered which have different costing models.
After we click the create button we get an update that shows us how the installation is progressing. The installation took just under 15 minutes to finish everything, launch the instance, and show us the configuration.
Once everything finishes we get the ip address, the passwords, and the ssh keys that were used to create this virtual machine.
We are able to open the link to the Tomcat server by clicking on the Go To The Application on the top right of the screen. This allows us to see the splash screen as well as access the management console.
When you click on the Access my Application you get the detailed information about the Tomcat server. We can go to the management console and look at the configuration as well as bring the server up and down.
At this point we have a valid configuration that we can see across the internet. The whole process took 15 minutes and did not require any editing or configurations other than selecting the configuration and giving the virtual machine a name.