Resources

Resources are managed by agents. A resource represents a deployment target, such as a physical machine, virtual machine, database, or J2EE container. Resources generally reside on the same host where its managing agent runs. If an agent is configured to handle multiple resources, a separate agent process is invoked for each one. Components are deployed to resources by agents, which are physical processes.

A resource can represent a physical machine, which is the simplest configuration, or a specific target on a machine, such as a database or server. A host machine can have several resources represented on it. In addition, a resource can represent a process distributed over several physical or virtual machines.

To perform a deployment, at least one resource must be defined and for non-trivial deployments, at least one agent must be defined. Typically, each host in a participating environment has an agent running on it to handle the resources located there.

A proxy resource is a resource effected by an agent on a host other than the one where the resource is located. If an agent does not require direct interaction with the file system or with process management on the host, a proxy resource can be used. When a deployment needs to interact with a service exposed on the network, such as a database or J2EE server, the interaction can happen from any machine that has access to the networked service.