Pass the IBM IBM Certified Administrator C1000-174 Questions and answers with CertsForce

IBM provides WebSphere Application Server on Microsoft Azure through offerings published in the Azure Marketplace, and the traditional product is available in configurations that cover its two main uses. The first is a cluster: the cluster offering provisions a Network Deployment cell with a deployment manager and clustered application servers across virtual machines, along with networking and load balancing, to give a highly available environment. That is option B. The second is a single instance: the single instance offering provisions one virtual machine with a stand-alone application server, which is suitable for development, testing, or modest workloads. That is option D.

The other titles do not describe Azure offerings for the traditional product. The term Open Edition, option A, is not an offering name for it, and WebSphere Application Server Base for Developers, option C, is a developer edition for local use that is not distributed as an Azure image. The IBM HTTP Server image in option E is not one of the application server offerings for running the product itself, although IBM HTTP Server may be used as a front end.

Before deploying, administrators should confirm the licensing arrangement, because these offerings can run under existing entitlements through bring-your-own-licence provisions, subject to the Passport Advantage policy for eligible public clouds.

Lightweight Third Party Authentication tokens are encrypted and signed with keys held in each cell's configuration. A token generated in one cell can only be accepted by another cell if both cells share the same LTPA keys, along with the same password and a compatible realm configuration. Single sign-on between two cells is therefore set up by taking the keys from one cell and placing them in the other. The sequence is to export the LTPA key from the first cell to a file, using the console's LTPA page or the exportLTPAKeys wsadmin task, and then to import that file into the second cell. Option A describes this: export from Cell A and import to Cell B.

The other sequences are not workable. Option B proposes importing the key to a text file, which is not an import into a cell and so does not share the key. Option C generates a key in Cell A, exports from Cell B, and imports to Cell A, which mixes the cells' roles and ends with Cell B's key unchanged, so the cells do not end up holding the same key. Option D exports from both cells, and neither cell receives the other's key.

After importing, the administrator saves the configuration, and generally restarts servers so that the new keys take effect. The user registries of the cells should resolve users to the same identities, and the domain name for the SSO cookie should be common to both.

The product can reflect many changes to a deployed application without a full redeployment, either through dynamic reloading, which applies to changes in classes and related files, or through fine-grained update operations in which individual files are added, replaced, or removed. Annotated classes are a special case. During application installation, the product scans the application's classes for annotations and uses the results to build metadata, so, for instance, servlets or web services declared by annotation are discovered at that time. When a change affects the class hierarchy of annotated classes, by adding, removing, or modifying superclasses or interfaces, the scan results can no longer be assumed accurate, and the metadata derived at installation must be regenerated.

The only action that regenerates it is a fresh installation of the application, which makes option A the correct answer. A simple restart, option B, reloads the code but reuses the stored metadata. Editing annotations manually, option C, does not apply because annotations live in the source code compiled into the archive. Modifying applications.xml, option D, would risk corrupting the deployment configuration and does not trigger a scan.

After such a change, administrators should uninstall or reinstall the updated archive, and confirm afterwards that the expected components and endpoints appear, reviewing the application's start-up messages for scan-related warnings.

Migration reports for enterprise applications are produced through administrative tasks. In wsadmin the AdminTask object provides createMigrationReport, which analyses one or more installed applications against a target, identifies issues, and stores the report with the application. Option A is correct. The task accepts parameters that identify the application or applications and the target of the analysis, and the resulting report can then be viewed in the console or with getMigrationReport. The matching console action is the Analyze button on the enterprise applications page.

The other commands do not exist or belong to a different object. AdminConfig.getMigrationReport, option B, combines a real task name with the wrong object, since AdminConfig deals with configuration objects and does not provide migration report functions. AdminConfig.getMigrationSummary, option C, is not a command in the product. AdminTask.createMigrationRecord, option D, uses a made-up command name, since the term used is "report".

Because the report depends on the application files, administrators must regenerate it after any redeployment, which removes the earlier version automatically. When many applications are to be assessed, a script that loops through the installed applications and calls createMigrationReport for each is an effective way to produce the whole set, and the reports can be examined together to plan the order of migration.

An enterprise application containing several modules, such as web modules and EJB modules, is deployed with a mapping of each module to one or more targets. The administrative console's Manage Modules page, and the wsadmin equivalents, let an administrator change that mapping after the installation. Modules may be placed on the same application server, or distributed among several application servers or clusters in the cell, according to capacity and availability needs. Option A is correct.

Option B is wrong because reinstalling is not the only route; the mappings can be edited directly in the application's configuration. Option C is incorrect as stated: a module may be mapped to more than one target, for example to multiple cluster members or to a cluster together with a web server for plug-in generation, so there is no rule that each entry maps to one and only one target. Option D is wrong because the changes do not require manual restart of the application in every case; the product applies the configuration after it is saved and synchronised, restarting the affected application as necessary.

Administrators should map modules that have a strong dependency, such as a web module and the EJB module it calls, thoughtfully, since placing them on separate servers introduces remote calls. Web server targets should also be included so the plug-in configuration lists the application's URLs.

The high availability manager is a service that runs in every server process of the cell and provides a framework for making components highly available. It maintains information about which servers are in each core group and which of them hosts a component. A key use is the failover of services that must run in only one place at a time. The best-known example is the messaging engine of the service integration bus: when the server running the engine fails, the high availability manager activates the engine on another member of the cluster, so messaging resumes. Option D is correct. The manager also supports transaction log recovery, memory-to-memory replication, and the singleton services for the on demand router.

The other statements are false. Option A is false because the manager is enabled by default on the servers. Option B is false because the setting can be administered in the console, in the server's high availability manager service page, where it can be enabled or disabled for each process. Option C is false because the deployment manager is itself a member of the cell's core group, and therefore does have the service, with the node agents and application servers.

Administrators should be cautious about disabling the manager on a server, since any component that relies on it would lose its failover capability, and core group sizes must be managed to limit the traffic that it generates.

Java 2 security gives WebSphere Application Server a policy-based mechanism for controlling which resources application code may access. Permissions are granted through policy files at several levels. Server-wide defaults live in files such as server.policy and the product's default policy, while permissions specific to one application are placed in a was.policy file packaged in the application's META-INF directory. The supported way to edit that file is the PolicyTool utility, which provides a graphical editor for policy files, including adding codebase entries and granting permissions such as file, socket, or runtime permissions. Option B is correct.

The alternatives are not valid. A file named was.policy.props does not exist as a policy file. The keytool utility manages keys, certificates, and keystores, so it addresses SSL and signing, and not permission grants. An app.policy file is a name used by other products and is not part of this runtime's policy structure.

Because an incorrectly granted permission weakens the sandbox, administrators should grant only the specific permissions an application demonstrably needs, and should rely on the product's tracing of AccessControlException messages to identify what was missing. Java 2 security must also be enabled for these files to have any effect, and an application restart is required for changes to apply.

Workload management distributes requests among the members of a cluster, and the layout of the tiers affects how many hops each request makes. In a single-tier topology, the web container and the EJB container run in the same application server, so calls between the two are local, avoiding serialisation and network transmission. With fewer hops and no remote method invocation between presentation and business logic, a single-tier arrangement delivers the best throughput, which is the reasoning behind option A.

A multi-tier topology, option D, places the web and EJB tiers on separate servers, and every call between them is a remote call that adds latency and resource consumption. That arrangement can be justified for security zoning, independent scaling, or administrative separation, but it carries a performance cost. Option B concerns core groups, which control membership of the high availability manager's failure detection and communication, so they influence management traffic and availability and are not a determinant of request throughput. Option C is incorrect because the differences between topologies are significant, not marginal.

When a design must nonetheless separate tiers, the administrator can mitigate the cost by using the optimisation that prefers a local EJB when one is available in the same server, and by tuning the ORB and connection pools between the tiers.

Database session persistence stores HTTP session data in a table of a relational database, so that sessions survive a server failure and can be shared among cluster members. The product offers two layouts. In the single-row schema, all of the session's data is held in one row, and the size of that row is limited by the database's row size, so large sessions can exceed the limit and be truncated or lost. In the multi-row schema, a session's data is spread across several rows, which removes the limit on session size and allows large sessions to be saved without loss. When users report data loss in session objects, the likely cause is large session data exceeding the single-row limit. The remedy is to select the multi-row schema on the session data source, drop the existing session table, and let the product recreate it with the new layout. Option B is correct.

Option A, periodic writing, would raise the risk of loss between writes because data changed since the last write is lost on failure. Option C, switching to memory-to-memory replication, changes the persistence mechanism altogether and does not correct the cause. Option D, enlarging the buffer pool and page size, may help the database performance but does not address a limit on the session's data in a row.

Dropping the table discards existing sessions, so the change should be scheduled for a quiet period, with users informed of the need to log in again.

The administrative configuration of a cell or stand-alone server is held in a repository of files, and the product provides a pair of commands for saving and recovering it. backupConfig writes the configuration directories of a profile into a compressed archive, and restoreConfig reads such an archive and replaces the profile's configuration with its contents. The utility named in option D, restoreConfig, is the correct one. It is run from the bin directory of the profile, and the archive is supplied as the file name argument.

The other names do not correspond to any shipped utility. restoreNDConfig, restore_Config, and restoreWASConfig imitate the pattern but are not product commands, so none could work.

The procedure requires care. All servers in the profile should be stopped before restoring, since replacing configuration files under a running process leads to inconsistent state. Where the restore is performed for a deployment manager, the nodes should be synchronised afterwards, and the administrator should be aware that restoring to a profile with a different host name or directory structure can cause problems unless the profile was created with the same layout. By default, the command may restore the profile into its original directory path, and the -location parameter can specify a different directory. A fresh backup beforehand protects against a mistaken restore.