IHS is based on Apache HTTP server, and it works, but when it comes to performance, then nothing beat Nginx web server. Nginx market share is gradually increasing in top million busiest sites.
Let’s see what it takes to integrate Nginx with IBM WAS. The following is demonstrated in Linux environment. I assume you have installed WAS & Nginx. If not, here is quick guide to installing Nginx
Login into Web Server Install using following commands
Few things to note when using Nginx.
You don’t need to use the WebSphere Plug-in. Instead, we will use proxy_pass You can either forward all request to WebSphere or by context root in location directive You need to specify all JVM host and port manually in Nginx configuration file
Let’s get it started…
Login to Nginx server Take a backup of nginx.conf file (/etc/nginx/nginx/conf in default installation location) Add the following upstream under http block
In above example, I am creating an upstream backend called “wasservers” and have configured two JVM. You can configure as many as you need. Note: if your WAS server is different than Nginx then you got to ensure necessary ports are allowed in the firewall. Next, I will instruct Nginx to forward all request to a newly created wasservers backend.
Add the following proxy_pass under location block
it should look like this
Restart the Nginx web server
Let’s verify by accessing WAS application through Nginx listening address
So you can see I got cachemonitor application opened through Nginx. This is very basic configuration to get IBM WAS integrated with Nginx as front-end web server. You may also be interested in exploring additional Nginx configuration like; Configuring load balancing – you can setup a load balancing to distribute request based on client IP. This would be useful or necessary if you have multiple JVM’s and want to persist the connection. This is possible by adding ip_hash in an upstream module. For ex: Taking WAS JVM out – if you have configured multiple JVM’s and for some reason one of them are having an issue, then you have two options. Either you delete the JVM server: port from an upstream module or leverage down parameter to temporarily disable the request forwarding. For ex: If you are looking for advanced configuration like session affinity, health checks, etc., hen you got to use Nginx Plus. I hope this short note give you an idea how to implement Nginx as a web server in front of IBM WAS. You may also refer to IBM official guide for more details.
