IBM WAS Java 8 and Portal nodes Java 7, how is managed?

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Hello guys

I have a cluster with 3 nodes (Portal 8.5), and WAS DMGR (8.5.5). Recently each node and DMGR were updated with the lates fixpack. The fixpack installed has Java 8 by default. In the DMGR java 8 is by default and the nodes have two version of java (8 and 7) but version 7 is by default, java 8 was not set by default.

My question are:

  1. Which java version is most important DMGR or nodes?
  2. How java versions are managed?
  3. Are there issues with portlets?
  4. What kind of test do you recommend to do?

Thanks for your help

Kind regards

2

Hi Ismael,
here are the answers to your question:

1. Java v7 is already out of support. for details, please check:
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/java-se-7-and-se-71-are-out-support-after-july-2022-websphere-application-server-85x#:~:text=Java%20SE%207%20and%20SE,for%20WebSphere%20Application%20Server%208.5.


You should change the Java version to Java v8 for all your JVMs (Dmgr, Node Agents and Servers!). By the way... It is not suggested to run just the Dmgr with Java v8 and the Node-Agents or Servers still with Java v7. You might can do that for a short period of time of migration, but best practice is to change the Java version of all JVMs to the same version to make sure that you don't run into any incompability issues, when we talk about the inner communication of all these JVMs.

2. Java versions are managed with the managesdk script. You can change the java version with that script command as described at IBMs page:
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/was/8.5.5?topic=applications-migrating-java-se-7-8

There are also options available in the IBM Integrated solutions console to change the java version there. For details, please check in the ISC (admin-console):

Application servers > WebSphere_Portal > Java SDKs
or...
Node agents > nodeagent > Java SDKs
or...
Deployment manager > Java SDKs

On that different pages it is possible to change the default version of Java. If both versions are listed, you can easily then change the default settings to Java v8 on that locations in the WAS admin console.

3. Usually when you upgrade your java from 7 to 8, in the most situations the java is backward compatible and Portlets, which are compiled with Java 7 might still run fine on Java 8. However... If you want to make sure that no issues happen with the Portlets I would suggest you to first recompile the Portlets with Java 8, before using them. That definitely require testing as soon as the Java is changed to Java v8.

4. As soon as you changed the java version to Java v8, all that you need to do is to monitor the server startup logs for any errors with your custom applications. If you don't find any java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionErrors, java.lang.ClassNotFoundErrors or any other kind of errors that you did not notice before, then I think you are good to still work with the existing Portlets.

I hope that helps
Thanks, Thorsten

3

Hello Thorsten

Thank you a lot for your help, I will check all the resouces that you have shared.

Kind regards