Spent five weeks and raised more than 10 PMRs against WAS, RTC and WASIHS and finally get the RTC HA implemented and working on a set of test servers including one IBM HTTP server, two RTC/WAS servers and two DB2 servers follwoing the instructions from http://jazz.net/library/article/207 and http://jazz.net/library/article/464.

I have to say that the documentation can be improved a lot so the next crab-eater won't have to spend the much time I had to. One may argue that most of the setup are not RTC, but WebSphere, IBM HTTP and Web Plugin and DB2. But the goal is to get RTC HA failover work in this complex infrastructure so it would be appreciated by many a lot if the documentation can be added with more details about configuration with the non-RTC components instead of just direct us to a link which just handles general cases, not RTC specific ones like HA failover.

Here are a few missing key points from the documentation I identified to share with the next explorer who dare to try it:

1. After you follow the instruction and install the web plugin on the web server using your primary RTC server's host name, you'll get a generated script and need to copy it over to your primary RTC server and run it there.
When you start to configure your standby RTC server, you have to wonder what to do: to install the web plugin again under the standby server's host name to gennerate the script to use or just use the one already created before? And the solution is to install the web plugin just once and use the same script for both RTC servers;

2. After you run the script above on your RTC server, you can manage the web server from the WAS admin console and you are instructed to regenerate the web plugin configuration file and propagate it bake to the web server. But the issue is you have two RTC servers, evertime you propagate the file from one of them, what you have on the web server from the other propagation is overwriten and you can't get a configuration working for both server.
Teh solution is to forget about the propagation and jusy go back to the web server and manually modify the plugin configuration file to handle both RTC servers;

3. There are instructions asking you to modify the web.xml file on your RTC primary server to replace all "CONFIDENTIAL" to "NONE" but you have to remember to do the same on your standby server otherwise you can get the snoop test work but no luck on RTC connection via the web server;

4. If you want to enable SSL on your web server, then you'll never get it work until you manually install the root singer certificate from your default trust node on your RTC server into the web plugin's keystore on your web server.


There are many more but these are the few major blockers which got me stuck for hours and days.