These days I am doing a lot of work with the Infor ION Grid – to learn, troubleshoot, and do penetration testing – and I need to setup my own laboratory. I will follow the footsteps of PotatoIT’s Lab.

Grid concepts

The Infor ION Grid is a proprietary application framework to run Java applications in a distributed, redundant, fail-over, load balanced, scalable, performant, and secure environment, sort of a crossing between IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), for the purposes of Infor products, and that over the years has become a rich framework that helps power the Infor CloudSuite. Grid concepts are explained in the Infor documentation and in my previous work. Basically, there are: hosts (physical/virtual machines), a registry (to keep track of the nodes), nodes (JVM), applications (e.g. M3), routers (to direct network traffic), and more.

Download

The Grid is available for download from the Infor Xtreme Product Download Center:

Documentation

The Installation Guide has a chapter Installing Infor ION Grid:

LCM? No.

The documentation says Infor LifeCycle Manager (LCM) is a prerequisite to install the Grid. But in my previous encounter with LCM I had concluded I can reproduce installation steps manually without LCM, albeit with a lot of work. Anyway, for my purposes I just need a minimal Grid without Infor M3 which makes the installation easier. To that end, I set out to learn how to install a minimal Grid manually without LCM. I will split my learning into several blog posts.

Version 0.x

In my archives of 10 years ago I found an early internal development unreleased version of the Grid with some documentation. It was a pure Java application that started Grid hosts, nodes, routers, registry, and user interface. It did not have database, certificates, configuration, or web server. It was not available publicly. Thanks to its simplicity, I will use it as a starting point of my learning.

1) Start the registry

java -cp grid.jar com.lawson.grid.Startup -registry -groupName THIBAUD

2) Start a node

java -cp grid.jar com.lawson.grid.Startup

3) Start a router

java -cp grid.jar com.lawson.grid.Startup -router

4) Start the user interface

java -jar grid.jar localhost 44444

Result

We have a minimal Grid with a host, a registry, a node, a router, and a user interface.

Future work

In my next blog posts, I will:

• Install a later version of the Grid
• Use the new Grid installer
• Install the Grid on Linux and PostgreSQL

Conclusion

That was a starting point for me to learn how to install a minimal Infor ION Grid manually without LifeCycle Manager. I will continue in the next post.

That’s it!

Related posts

• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 1 – early Grid version 0.x
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 2 – latest Grid version 11.x
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 2bis – Configuration Manager
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 3 – Cryptographic keys
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 4 – Grid installer
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 4bis – Console and silent install
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 5 – PostgreSQL database
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 6 – Ubuntu Linux
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 6bis – CentOS Linux
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 7 – Virtual Private Cloud