Installing the VMware Tanzu GemFire Session Management Extension

This topic describes how to install the VMware Tanzu GemFire Session Management extension.

The Tanzu GemFire Session Management extension must be downloaded separately from the Tanzu GemFire installation package and is no longer bundled in the Tanzu GemFire .tgz like it was in Tanzu GemFire version 10.0.

1. If you have not already installed Tanzu GemFire, download and install Tanzu GemFire following the instructions in Installing VMware Tanzu GemFire from a Compressed TAR File on Windows, Unix, and Linux.

2. If you have not already installed Tomcat, download Tomcat 9.0 or 10.1 from the Apache Tomcat® website and install it.

   Note: Tomcat 10.1.x requires Java 11 or later.

3. Set the CATALINA_HOME environment variable if it is not already defined. Following the Apache Tomcat convention, this topic assumes the CATALINA_HOME environment variable is set to the root directory of the Tomcat distribution binary. For example, if Apache Tomcat is installed in /usr/bin/apache-tomcat-10.1.20 then you can set CATALINA_HOME as follows:

   CATALINA_HOME=/usr/bin/apache-tomcat-10.1.20
   

4. (Optional) For development purposes, you may want to establish manager-level access to Tomcat. To do so, edit the $CATALINA_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml file. Remove the comment marks from the following line, and replace the <must-be-changed> placeholder with a password of your choice:

   <user username="admin" password="<must-be-changed>" roles="manager-gui"/>
   

   This creates a user with manager access with username “admin” and the password that you supplied. Log in as this user to view system information when following links from the Tomcat home page.

5. During the installation of VMware GemFire, the gemfire-client-dependencies-<SERVER-VERSION>.zip file is extracted from the vmware-gemfire-<SERVER-VERSION>.tgz file, where SERVER-VERSION is the version of GemFire that you installed. Unzip the .zip file to $CATALINA_HOME/lib. For example:

   unzip $GEMFIRE_HOME/tools/Modules/gemfire-session-management/gemfire-client-dependencies-10.1.1.zip -d $CATALINA_HOME/lib
   

6. Log in to Broadcom Customer Support Portal with your customer credentials.

7. Go to the VMware Tanzu GemFire downloads page. Select VMware Tanzu GemFire, and select Session Management 1.0.0.

8. Click I agree to Terms and Conditions. Click the HTTPS Download icon next to GemFire Session Management to download the tgz file.

9. Untar the Session Management Extension file that you downloaded to /tmp. For example:

   tar -xzvf gemfire-session-management-1.0.0.tgz -C /tmp
   

   The extracted files includes .zip files and .gfm files. These files have names indicating the Session Management Extension version, and are located in directories with names indicating different versions of Tomcat.

   Tomcat Version	Directory and File Names
   Tomcat 9	/tmp/Tomcat9/gemfire-session-management-tomcat9-1.0.0.zip
   Tomcat 9	/tmp/Tomcat9/gemfire-session-management-tomcat9-1.0.0.gfm
   Tomcat 10.1	/tmp/Tomcat10/gemfire-session-management-tomcat10-1.0.0.zip
   Tomcat 10.1	/tmp/Tomcat10/gemfire-session-management-tomcat10-1.0.0.gfm

10. Unzip the .zip file that corresponds to your version of Tomcat to $CATALINA_HOME/lib. For example:

    unzip /tmp/Tomcat10/gemfire-session-management-tomcat10-1.0.0.zip -d $CATALINA_HOME/lib
    

11. Copy the .gfm file that corresponds to your version of Tomcat to $GEMFIRE_HOME/extensions. For example:

    cp /tmp/gemfire-session-management-1.0.0/Tomcat10/gemfire-session-management-tomcat10-1.0.0.gfm $GEMFIRE_HOME/extensions
    

12. Copy the Session Management Extension configuration files from the lib directory of your Tomcat installation to the Tomcat conf directory. For example:

    cd $CATALINA_HOME
    cp -a lib/conf/*.xml conf
    

13. Proceed to Setting Up the GemFire Session Management Extension to complete your Tomcat configuration.