Nolio Agent, EOL JAVA Licenses & Removal

Products

• CA Release Automation - Release Operations Center (Nolio)
• CA Release Automation - DataManagement Server (Nolio)

Issue/Introduction

Is JAVA necessary on the Nolio Release Automation Agents ?

We know that it was needed for launching the Automation Studio. But apart from that do we still need Java or can we remove it ?

 

Environment

Release : 6.6

Component : CA RELEASE AUTOMATION AGENT

Cause

Wanting to remove old and unsupported versions of Java. 

Resolution

In short, it depends. The Release Automation Agent is absolutely a java application/program. However, there have been two types of agent installers. The two types are:

1. Agent installers that bundle the jre that the agent will use (aka: a private jre - as it's not used by other applications). 
2. An Agent installer that does not bundle a jre. Instead, it requires a public jre to be made available. When an agent uses a public jre (on Linux) it creates the <agent_home>/jre/bin and <agent_home>/jre/lib folders with links to the public jre files that it needs to function. 

If you know which agent installer you used and know that it was the agent installer that bundled the jre then you can remove it. But if you used the agent installer that uses a public jre then you must be careful and not remove the jre used by the agent. If you're not sure then you can typically navigate to the <agent_home>/jre folder. If you see the files/folders that you would normally expect to see in a jre installation and they are not links to files located somewhere else on the system then the public jre versions of java can be removed.