With the release of Lawson Business intelligence (LBI) 9.0.2, Lawson made the decision to no longer support Tomcat in a production environment. Many companies will now need to migrate LBI to Websphere since it is the only supported platform. Since LBI is a Windows-only web application the move to Websphere seems like a good step (though I would rather see Lawson add Unix support than take away Tomcat).
Sadly there is no documentation that I can find on how to move LBI from Tomcat to Websphere. I am making this transition for one of my clients as we speak so I figured it would be a good idea to document the process that worked for me.
- Upgrade LBI to the most current release.
- Backup the LawsonBusinessIntelligence and LawsonDocuments directories.
- Backup the LawsonFS, LawsonRS, and LawsonSN databases.
- Create new databases for temporary use by Websphere. I used wsLawsonFS, wsLawsonRS, wsLawsonSN.
- Stop Tomcat.
- Install Websphere.
- Install IBM HTTP Server (set it to the current port that you use to access LBI. The Lawson default is 8282, but some companies prefer to use port 80, which could conflickt with IIS depending on your setup)
- Create Data Sources in Websphere for wsLawsonFS, wsLawsonRS, and wsLawsonSN. These data sources should have the standard JNDI names (jdbc/LasonFS, jdbc/LawsonRS, jdbc/LawsonSN)
- Use the LBI installer to install LBI into Websphere (as a new installation, not an upgrade)
- Verify that LBI is working properly in Websphere.
- Edit the Websphere data sources to point to the original LBI databases (i.e. jdbc/LawsonFS now points to LawsonFS)
- Test LBI to verify everything works (admin acct will still be set to lawson/lawson)
- If there is problems accessing reports or Reporting Services Admin then edit the RS service via the Tools Dashboard. I had to remove en-us from the URLs.
- Run the Reporting Services installation validator to point LawsonDocuments to the proper location.
- Configure your authentication source using the SysConfig editor.
That worked for me. If you are thinking about going through this process and would like assistance, my contact information is in the right sidebar.
2 Comments
Jackson,
We have not even really started and you are saying that we need to upgrade to Websphere?
Frank,
Not quite. I think the official word from Lawson is that LBI 9.0.2 combined with LSF 9 is only supported under Websphere. (Tomcat is supported only in development, which is silly since why would you want development and production systems on different platforms).
I haven’t seen anyone be forced to migrate to Websphere, but it is definitely better supported by Lawson. I do think eventually al LBI customers will be on Websphere, but all Lawson customers will eventually be on LSF9 too.