Progress Sonic 8.5 Installation and Upgrade Guide - Product ...

Chapter 5: Using Response Files with Installers
Creating Scripted Launcher Installations for Host Managers
Centralized installation provides many strategies that remove the burden of distributed
installation and upgrade of widely dispersed machines:
● The Domain Manager is the central repository of licensed components, provisioning
remote machines with required libraries without any intervention at remote sites.
● The Sonic Deployment Manager acts on the Domain Manager system to map
configurations in its models to machines in the distributed topology through Host
Manager objects running on the remote machines.
● The Sonic Launcher provides easy installation of Sonic container resources and can
setup a container that connects to its assigned domain.
That last step can still be error prone. Until the container is given a name that will be
unique in the domain and the configuration is set up and running, remote administrators
cannot perform any maintenance functions.
The following techniques describe how, on Windows systems, a simple script and a
properties file installed on a machine can set up Sonic resources, configure a container
that uses the host’s name, start it, and connect it to its assigned domain, silently, with no
user input whatsoever.
Consider the following scenario for this example:
1. One or more Domain Managers are installed at various locations in the enterprise.
2. In some domains, the containers are grouped on management lines, perhaps as
regions.
3. The network identity of machines that will cooperate in a domain are defined with
unique names by the systems and network teams.
4. The optimal setup on a distributed machine would be a container that contains a Host
Manager, and that is setup as a Windows Service. The container would always be
running and would be accessible to administrators for deploying additional containers
and assets on the remote system.
The following properties file was created as a response file from a Container Launcher
installation, then edited to:
● Specify a standard installation location and to use the installed JRE.
● Specify connection information for the assigned domain.
● Stub the container name and path, and the Windows Service name.
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