A host controller is launched when the domain.sh or domain.bat script is run on a host.

The primary responsibility of a host controller is server management. It delegates domain management tasks and is responsible for starting and stopping the individual application server processes that run on its host.

It interacts with the domain controller to help manage the communication between the servers and the domain controller. Multiple host controllers of a domain can interact with only a single domain controller. Hence, all the host controllers and server instances running on a single domain mode have a single domain controller and must belong to the same domain.

By default each host controller reads its configuration from the domain/configuration/host.xml file located in the unzipped ${build.shortName} installation file on its host's filesystem. The host.xml file contains the following configuration information that is specific to the particular host: