Getting Started with WebLogic Server
As we’ve already seen, all WebLogic instances and their resources exist within the context of an organizational unit called a WebLogic domain. Within the domain, you can set up multiple servers, customize their network configurations, and deploy multiple J2EE applications and any required resources. You may even set up WebLogic clusters using a subset of the servers in the domain. All servers in the cluster can then work together to provide support for failover and load balancing.
One server in the domain is vital to its existence: the Administration Server that manages the configuration for the entire domain. This includes the configuration of all servers within the domain, and all applications and services deployed to these servers. Other servers in the domain, called Managed Servers, host the actual J2EE applications and resources such as JDBC connection pools, data sources, JMS connection factories, topics and queues, RMI objects, and so on. The Administration Server merely manages the entire configuration of these servers. In a single-server domain, you have little choice but to deploy your applications to the Administration Server itself. However, in a production environment, we recommend you deploy your applications to a separate server.
WebLogic is fairly flexible about how you configure the servers in the domain. So long as all Managed Servers in the domain can reach the Administration Server over the same network, WebLogic doesn’t care ...