Now let's talk about the phases in the new deployment model.

If deployment of an application fails in either the prepare or activation phase, then the cluster deployment will fail. In the case of a non-cluster environment, the application won't be prepared or activated.

Application Staging
To efficiently support Content Management Providers, WebLogic Server 7.0 introduced several staging modes, described below.

Nostage
You do not need to copy application files to another location. A server in nostage mode will run applications deployed to it directly from their source directories. For example:

java weblogic. Deployer url {admin-url}
-username {admin-user} -activate -nostage
-source c:/myapps/myapp.ear -targets managed-server1
-password {admin-password}

This command activates the EAR specified with the name myapp. The application is deployed to the targeted server, which in this case is called managed-server1.

The -nostage option indicates that the application path "c:/myapps" is available on all of the servers in the domain and that it is not necessary to "stage" or transfer the files to the managed servers (e.g., shared file system).

This staging mode may not be helpful if admin & managed servers are in different machines or in different Operating Systems.

Stage
The stage mode copies application files to servers targeted in deployment phase. This means that the application will automatically be copied to the staging directory on the server. The servers will initialize and run the application from this directory.

java weblogic.Deployer url {admin-url} -username
{admin-user} -password {admin-password} -activate -stage
-source c:/myapps/myapp.ear -targets managed-server1

This command activates the EAR specified with the name myapp. The application is deployed to the targeted server, which in this case is called managed-server1.

The -stage option indicates that the application files are copied from -source directory to a directory with the application name under each target server's staging directory.

External_stage
The administrator manually copies files to the server's staging directory. In the external stage mode, the application will be run from a staging directory to which an external entity is expected to distribute the files. (e.g., CMP's)

java weblogic.Deployer url {admin-url} -username {admin-user}
-password {admin-password} -activate -external_stage
-source C:/myapp/myapp.ear -targets managed-server1, managed-server2

This command activates the EAR specified with the name myapp. The application is deployed to the targeted server, which in this case is called managed-server1.

The -external_stage option indicates that the application files expect to be copied under each target server's staging directory.

Default Staging modes
For Admin servers, the default is "nostage". For Managed Servers, the default is "stage".

The staging directory for each server is located under $WL_HOME/user_projects/mydomain/{server_name}/stage

Available Deployment Tools for Two-Phase Deployment
WebLogic Server 7.0 provides the following deployment tools to deploy applications using the two-phase deployment model:

1. weblogic.Deployer command line utility
2. WLS admin console
3. WebLogic Builder
4. Deployment via applications folder

References