Node agents are administrative agents that represent a node to your system and manage the servers on that node. Node agents monitor application servers on a host system and route administrative requests to servers. Before you can manage a node agent, install the Network Deployment product.
If you plan to change the system clock, stop all the application servers, the node agent servers, and the deployment manager server first. Once you stop the servers, change the system clock, and then restart the servers. If you change the system clock on one system, ensure the clocks on all systems that communicate with each other and have WebSphere Application Server installed are synchronized. Otherwise, you might experience issues, such as security tokens no longer being valid.
A node agent is a server that is created automatically when a node is added to a cell. A node agent runs on every host computer system that participates in the Network Deployment product. You can view information about a node agent, stop and start the processing of a node agent, stop and restart application servers on the node that is managed by the node agent, and so on.
A node agent is purely an administrative agent and is not involved in application serving functions. A node agent also hosts other important administrative functions, such as file transfer services, configuration synchronization, and performance monitoring.
You can manage nodes through the wsadmin scripting tool, through the Java APIs, or through the administrative console. Perform the following tasks to manage nodes on an application server through the administrative console.
IP verions: WebSphere Application Server on other platforms has support for IPv4 and IPv6. However, the i5/OS platform supports only IPv4. When you add a node to a cell, the format in which you specify the host name is based on the version of IP the node will be using. See IP version considerations for cells.
Tip: The node agent for the node must be processing to restart application servers on the node.