Deploying and Starting - Hazelcast Management Center Manual

You have two options to start Hazelcast Management Center:

Deploy the file mancenter-version.war on your Java application server/container.
Start Hazelcast Management Center from the command line and then have the Hazelcast cluster members communicate with it. This means that your members should know the URL of the mancenter application before they start.

Starting with WAR File

Here are the steps.

Download the latest Hazelcast ZIP from hazelcast.org. The ZIP contains the mancenter-version.war file under the directory mancenter.
You can directly start mancenter-version.war file from the command line. The following command will start Hazelcast Management Center on port 8080 with context root 'mancenter' (http://localhost:8080/mancenter).

java -jar mancenter-*version*.war 8080 mancenter

Enabling TLS/SSL when starting with WAR file

When you start Management Center from the command line, it will serve the pages unencrypted by using "http", by default. To enable TLS/SSL, use the following command line parameters when starting the Management Center:

-Dhazelcast.mc.tls.enabled=true (default is false)
-Dhazelcast.mc.tls.keyStore=path to your keyStore
-Dhazelcast.mc.tls.keyStorePassword=password for your keyStore
-Dhazelcast.mc.tls.trustStore=path to your trustStore
-Dhazelcast.mc.tls.trustStorePassword=password for your trustStore

You can leave trust store and trust store password values empty to use the system JVM's own trust store.

Following is an example on how to start Management Center with TLS/SSL enabled from the command line:

java -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.enabled=true -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.keyStore=/some/dir/selfsigned.jks -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.keyStorePassword=yourpassword -jar mancenter-3.8.2.war

You can access Management Center from the following HTTPS URL on port 8443: https://localhost:8443/mancenter

To override the HTTPS port, you can give it as the second argument when starting Management Center. For example:

java -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.enabled=true -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.keyStore=/dir/to/certificate.jks -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.keyStorePassword=yourpassword -jar mancenter-3.8.2.war 80 443 mancenter

This will start Management Center on HTTP port 80 and HTTPS port 443 with context path /mancenter. Note that accessing port 80 with an http:// prefix will redirect the users to an https:// URL on port 443. It means that the users will use HTTPS regardless of the version of the URL they use.

Mutual authentication

Mutual authentication allows cluster members to have their keyStores and Management Center to have their trustStores so that Management Center can know which members it can trust. To enable mutual authentication, you need to use the following command line parameters when starting the Management Center:

-Dhazelcast.mc.tls.mutualAuthentication=REQUIRED

And at member side, you need to set the following JVM arguments when starting the member:

-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStore=path to your keyStore -Djavax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword=yourpassword

Please see the below example snippet to see the full command to start Management Center:

java -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.enabled=true -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.keyStore=path to your keyStore -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.keyStorePassword=password for your keyStore -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.trustStore=path to your trustStore -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.trustStorePassword=password for your trustStore -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.mutualAuthentication=REQUIRED -jar mancenter.war

And the full command to start the cluster member:

java -Djavax.net.ssl.keyStore=path to your keyStore -Djavax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword=yourpassword -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=path to your trustStore -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword=yourpassword -jar hazelcast.jar

The parameter -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.mutualAuthentication has two options:

REQUIRED: If the cluster member does not provide a keystore or the provided keys are not included in Management Center's truststore, the cluster member will not be authenticated.
OPTIONAL: If the cluster member does not provide a keystore, it will be authenticated. But if the cluster member provides keys that are not included in Management Center's truststore, the cluster member will not be authenticated.

Excluding Specific TLS/SSL Protocols

When you enable TLS on the Management Center, it will support the clients connecting with any of the TLS/SSL protocols that the JVM supports by default. In order to disable specific protocols, you need to set the -Dhazelcast.mc.tls.excludeProtocols command line argument to a comma separated list of protocols to be excluded from the list of supported protocols. For example, to allow only TLSv1.2, you need to add the following command line argument when starting the Management Center:

-Dhazelcast.mc.tls.excludeProtocols=SSLv3,SSLv2Hello,TLSv1,TLSv1.1

When you specify the above argument, you should see a line similar to the following in the Management Center log:

2017-06-21 12:35:54.856:INFO:oejus.SslContextFactory:Enabled Protocols [TLSv1.2] of [SSLv2Hello, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1.1, TLSv1.2]

Starting with an Extra Classpath

You can also start the Management Center with an extra classpath entry (for example, when using JAAS authentication) by using the following command:

java -cp "mancenter-*version*.war:/path/to/an/extra.jar" Launcher 8080 mancenter

On Windows, the command becomes as follows (semicolon instead of colon):

java -cp "mancenter-*version*.war;/path/to/an/extra.jar" Launcher 8080 mancenter

Starting with Scripts

Optionally, you can use the scripts startManCenter.bat or startManCenter.sh located in the directory mancenter to start the Management Center.

Deploying to Application Server

Or, instead of starting at the command line, you can deploy it to your application server (Tomcat, Jetty, etc.).

If you have deployed mancenter-*version*.war in your already-SSL-enabled web container, configure hazelcast.xml as follows.

<management-center enabled="true">
    https://localhost:sslPortNumber/mancenter
</management-center>

If you are using an untrusted certificate for your container, which you created yourself, you need to add that certificate to your JVM first. Download the certificate from the browser, after this you can add it to JVM as follows.

keytool -import -noprompt -trustcacerts -alias <AliasName> -file <certificateFile> -keystore $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/cacerts -storepass <Password>

Connecting Hazelcast members to Management Center

After you perform the above steps, make sure that http://localhost:8080/mancenter is up.

Configure your Hazelcast members by adding the URL of your web application to your hazelcast.xml. Hazelcast members will send their states to this URL.

<management-center enabled="true">
    http://localhost:8080/mancenter
</management-center>

If you enabled TLS/SSL on Management Center, then you will need to configure the members with the relevant keystore & trustore. In that case you expand the above configuration as follows.

<management-center enabled="true">
  <url>https://localhost:sslPortNumber/mancenter</url>
  <mutual-auth>
    <factory-class-name>
        com.hazelcast.nio.ssl.BasicSSLContextFactory
    </factory-class-name>
    <properties>
        <property name="keyStore">keyStore</property>
        <property name="keyStorePassword">keyStorePassword</property>
        <property name="protocol">TLS</property>
    </properties>
  </mutual-auth>
</management-center>

In the example above, Hazelcast's default SSL context factory (BasicSSLContextFactory) is used; you can also provide your own implementation of this factory.

Here are the descriptions for the properties:

keystore: Path of your keystore file. Note that your keystore's type must be JKS.
keyStorePassword: Password to access the key from your keystore file.
keyManagerAlgorithm: Name of the algorithm based on which the authentication keys are provided.
keyStoreType: The type of the keystore. Its default value is JKS.
truststore: Path of your truststore file. The file truststore is a keystore file that contains a collection of certificates trusted by your application. Its type should be JKS.
trustStorePassword: Password to unlock the truststore file.
trustManagerAlgorithm: Name of the algorithm based on which the trust managers are provided.
trustStoreType: The type of the truststore. Its default value is JKS.
protocol: Name of the algorithm which is used in your TLS/SSL. Its default value is TLS. Available values are:
- SSL
- SSLv2
- SSLv3
- TLS
- TLSv1
- TLSv1.1
- TLSv1.2

See the programmatic configuration example below:

Config config = new Config();
SSLContextFactory factory = new BasicSSLContextFactory();

MCMutualAuthConfig mcMutualAuthConfig = new MCMutualAuthConfig().setEnabled(true).setFactoryImplementation(factory)
        .setProperty("keyStore", "/path/to/keyStore")
        .setProperty("keyStorePassword", "password")
        .setProperty("keyManagerAlgorithm", "SunX509")
        .setProperty("trustStore", "/path/to/truststore")
        .setProperty("trustStorePassword", "password")
        .setProperty("trustManagerAlgorithm", "SunX509");

ManagementCenterConfig mcc = new ManagementCenterConfig()
    .setEnabled(true)
    .setMutualAuthConfig(mcMutualAuthConfig)
    .setUrl("https://localhost:8443/mancenter");

config.setManagementCenterConfig(mcc);

HazelcastInstance hz = Hazelcast.newHazelcastInstance(config);

NOTE: All of the above algorithms support Java 6 and higher versions, except the TLSv1.2 supports Java 7 and higher versions. For the protocol property, we recommend you to provide SSL or TLS with its version information, e.g., TLSv1.2. Note that if you write only SSL or TLS, your application will choose the SSL or TLS version according to your Java version.

Now you can start your Hazelcast cluster, browse to http://localhost:8080/mancenter or https://localhost:sslPortNumber/mancenter (depending on installation) and setup your administrator account explained in the next section.

Configuring Update Interval

You can set a frequency (in seconds) for which Management Center will take information from the Hazelcast cluster, using the element update-interval as shown below. update-interval is optional and its default value is 3 seconds.

<management-center enabled="true" update-interval="3">
   http://localhost:8080/mancenter
</management-center>

Configuring Logging

Management Center uses Logback for its logging. By default, it uses the following configuration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    
    <appender name="STDOUT" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
        <layout class="ch.qos.logback.classic.PatternLayout">
            <Pattern>
                %d{yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss} [%thread] %-5level %logger{36} - %msg%n
            </Pattern>
        </layout>
    </appender>
    
    <root level="INFO">
        <appender-ref ref="STDOUT"/>
    </root>
</configuration>

To change the logging configuration, you can create a custom Logback configuration file and start Management Center with the -Dlogback.configurationFile option pointing to your configuration file.

For example, you can create a file named logback-custom.xml with the following content and set logging level to DEBUG. To use this file as the logging configuration, you need to start Management Center with -Dlogback.configurationFile=/path/to/your/logback-custom.xml command line parameter:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>


    <appender name="STDOUT" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
        <layout class="ch.qos.logback.classic.PatternLayout">
            <Pattern>
                %d{yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss} [%thread] %-5level %logger{36} - %msg%n
            </Pattern>
        </layout>
    </appender>
    
    <root level="DEBUG">
        <appender-ref ref="STDOUT"/>
    </root>
</configuration>