How to create a new WebSphere profile

Profiles

The WebSphere Application Server configuration is based on so called "profiles".
Profiles are containers which contain a set of configurations for one WebSphere Application Server node. A node is an installation of WebSphere. Therefore a node can contain several profiles.

For more information about webspheres configuration items please refer to this blog post.

How to create a profile

WebSphere profiles can be created in two ways:
  • GUI-based
  • Script-based
The GUI is not working on some Unix-based system.

GUI based

IBM provides a eclipse based tool called "Profile Management Tool" (PMT) to manage Websphere profiles.
Open PMT (located at <websphere-installation-path>/bin/ProfileManagement/pmt.sh|bat)
and click on the "Create" button to start the process for generating new websphere profile. A wizard appears, which guides you through the procedure.

Steps of the wizard:
  1. Select Application Server in the first step unless you want to create a deployment manager profile.
  2. Select Advanced profile creation otherwise PMT will automatically fill out some important values.
  3. Select the default application to install. If you wish to unselect one option please do so. However do not remove the administrative console.
  4. Select the installation path of the profile and the profile name. You can also select a pre-configured configuration set for the application server (default/peak/development) in this step.
  5. Define the node name, server name and host name for your profile.
  6. Enable administrative security if needed. This can be also done later with the administrative console.
  7. Select if you let the PMT generate the needed ssl certificates or if you wish to customize the certificate attributes.
  8. Select some more certificate attributes like validity and the common name.
  9. Define the network ports Websphere uses. Usually no changes required here.
  10. If you are running on windows, the PMT askes you if you wish to install WebSphere as a Windows Service. My recommandation is to do it NOT. So deselect the option.
  11. Select if you wish to additionally create a webserver profile. However this is just a configuration set for a already existing installation of a IBM HTTP Server. 
  12. Step 12 shows a summary if the selected configurations. Click "Create" to start the creation process.
After the creation process finished you can launch the first step console. To start the newly created profile execute
<profile-path>/bin/startServer.sh|bat <server-name>

Script based

IBM provides a command line tool called manageprofiles.sh|bat to create profiles from command line. manageprofiles.sh|bat is great for automate the process of generating Websphere profiles.
The officical documantion is availalbe here.

To create a new profile the attributes of the profile need to be passed to manageprofiles.sh|bat as command line parameters.
My recommandation is to use so called response files (parameter = -response). Response files are simple test configuration files for the manageprofiles tool. A response file can look like this.

create
profileName=AppSrv3
profilePath=/opt/WebSphere/profiles/AppSrv3
templatePath=/opt/WebSphere/profileTemplates/default
nodeName=MarcelsNode3
cellName=MarcelsCell
hostName=MarcelsServer

Execute the following command line to create the defined profile.

<websphere-installation-path>/bin/manageprofiles.sh|bat -response <respone-file-path>