This documentation describes product concepts and provides complete setup instructions for VMware tc Server enterprise application server. tc Server is completely compatible with Apache Tomcat. Read this documentation to configure and manage tc Runtime instances, and deploy Web applications.

For a comparison of tc Server and Apache Tomcat features, see How VMware tc Server Differs from Apache Tomcat? For a chart of when new features are added to tc Server 4.1.x, see VMware tc Server Feature Chart.

tc Server Demonstration

VMware tc Server provides tooling to easily create a tc Runtime (Tomcat) instance, deploy your application, and start the instance.

Creating a new tc Runtime (Tomcat) instance is as easy as running a single command.

tcserver create demo-instance
Figure 1.

By default VMware tc Server creates a new instance with a separate CATALINA_HOME and CATALINA_BASE it is highly recommended to keep this default. This layout makes it easier to upgrade and keep your application specifics separate from the tc Runtime (Tomcat).

VMware tc Server offers a feature we call instance descriptor file which contains the properties used to create an instance such as name, templates, application, and any changes to default properties. By using an instance descriptor file it is easy to recreate an instance. In a containerized environment one can easily create, deploy, and start an instance with a single command. Please see the tc Server Kubernetes How-to for more details.

Figure 2.

The above screenshot shows how to use an instance descriptor file to create an instance, deploy the Tomcat sample application, and start the instance as a foreground process. It can be reached via http://localhost:8080/ The instance descriptor file used above looks like the following:

instance:
  name: tcserver-demo
  templates:
    - nio
  applications:
    - https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/appdev/sample/sample.war=ROOT.war

This file defines the name of the instance as tcserver-demo, the name is used to identify the tc Runtime (Tomcat) instance when issuing tcserver commands. It should be meaningful to you. This instance uses the nio template, which is the default is provided only for illustration purposes in the example. It also deploys the Tomcat sample application to the tc Runtime (Tomcat) instance’s webapps folder as a file named ROOT.war.

The command used by the above screenshot is

tcserver create-from-file tcserver-demo.yaml --run

The --run command line option is new to VMware tc Server version 4.1.0. It instructions VMware tc Server to run the instance after it is created. This is the same as if two commands had been entered.

tcserver create-from-file tcserver-demo.yaml
tcserver run tcserver-demo.yaml

By combining into a single command a Dockerfile may use a single RUN command which will tell VMware tc Server create the instance, pull down a remote .war file, deploy it, and run the instance all in the foreground.