This article is the first in a series that introduces the IBM® WebSphere® Appliance Management Toolkit and shows you how to use it to communicate with and manage heterogeneous collections of DataPower® devices. The Toolkit is a Java®-based component that provides multi-appliance management support.

You can write software that uses the WebSphere Appliance Management Toolkit to manage collections of devices, called ManagedSets. The software must instantiate and complete the configuration steps to use the device management functions. Each ManagedSet can consist of heterogeneous DataPower devices with different hardware types, firmware levels, and licenses. The Toolkit lets you easily synchronize configuration changes across a set of devices, support configuration life cycle deployment, centralize firmware management, and perform disaster recovery. It also helps you quiesce and unquiesce DataPower devices and domains for maintenance, and it supports operations on single unmanaged devices that do not belong to a ManagedSet.

This article shows you how to set up the WebSphere Appliance Management Toolkit and run a sample application that uses its features. At the bottom of the article, you can download the sample application, the requisite JAR files, and extensive Java documentation for the WebSphere Appliance Management Toolkit.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/1011_burke/1011_burke.html