Introduction

GlassFish 3.1 requires SSH to support some instance lifecycle operations such as:

• Creating/deleting an instance on a remote system (create-instance/delete-instance)
• Starting an instance on a remote system (start-instance)
• Starting a cluster that contains instances on remote systems (start-cluster)

This works fine for Unix systems where SSH services are common and familiar. But on Windows you need to install a third party SSH provider.

If you choose not to set your Windows boxes up with SSH you can still use GlassFish clustering. But in this case you will need to create/delete instances by running create-local-instance/delete-local-instance directly on the instance system and start them by running start-local-instance directly on the instance system (or via GlassFish's native service support).

If you choose to set your Windows boxes up with SSH, then continue reading!

Choosing an SSH provider

GlassFish 3.1 has been tested with two SSH providers. One is commercial, and the other is freely available. The choices:

Installing the SSH provider

You need to install the SSH provider on all systems that will be hosting GlassFish instances, including the system that will be running the GlassFish Domain Admin Server (DAS). The DAS system will be acting as an SSH client, and therefore does not need sshd running, but the instance systems must have sshd running (strictly speaking the DAS system does not need the SSH provider installed on it – but practically speaking it makes things much easier to manage if it does).

MKS Toolkit

Go to MKS Toolkit , acquire the software and follow their instructions.

Cygwin

TBD. Some information here. See example use-case

User Accounts and Home Directories

Configuring the SSH provider