Resources

Resources represent a deployment target on a Deployment Automation environment. Examples include physical machines, virtual machines, databases, or J2EE containers.

The agents themselves appear in the Resources tab list, as do resources logically defined to subdivide or group the agents. 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.