Configuring WebSphere Application Server HTTP session persistence to a data grid
You can configure your WebSphere® Application Server application to persist sessions to a data grid. This data grid can be in an embedded container server that runs within WebSphere Application Server, or it can be in a remote data grid.
Before you begin
- The name of the session data grid that you want to use. See Configuring the HTTP session manager with WebSphere Application Server for information about creating a session data grid.
- If the catalog service to manage your sessions is outside of the cell in which you are installing your session application, you must create a catalog service domain. For more information, see Creating catalog service domains in WebSphere Application Server.
- If you are configuring a catalog service domain, you might must enable client security on the catalog service domain if the container servers require authentication. These settings inform the run time which CredentialGenerator implementation to use. This implementation generates a credential to pass to the remote data grid. For more information, see Configuring client security on a catalog service domain.
- Enable global security in the WebSphere Application Server administrative console,
if you support one of these scenarios:
- The catalog servers within your catalog service domain have Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) enabled.
- You want to use SSL for a catalog service domain with SSL supported.
- If you are using Version 7.1.0.3 or later, you can persist sessions that use URL rewriting or cookies as a session tracking mechanism to the data grid. For releases before Version 7.1.0.3, you cannot persist sessions that use URL rewriting as a session tracking mechanism. To enable the persistence of sessions that use URL rewriting, set the useURLEncoding property to true in the splicer.properties file after you automatically splice the application.
- When you are automatically splicing applications for HTTP session management in WebSphere Application Server , all of the application servers that host the web application have the HttpSessionIdReuse web container custom property that is set to true. This property enables sessions that fail over from one application server to another, or are invalidated from the in-memory session cache in a remote scenario to preserve its session ID across requests. If you do not want this behavior, set the web container custom property to false on all of the applicable application servers before you configure session management for the applications. For more information about this custom property, see Troubleshooting cache integration.