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
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:
- Select Application Server in the first step unless you want to create a deployment manager profile.
- Select Advanced profile creation otherwise PMT will automatically fill out some important values.
- Select the default application to install. If you wish to unselect one option please do so. However do not remove the administrative console.
- 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.
- Define the node name, server name and host name for your profile.
- Enable administrative security if needed. This can be also done later with the administrative console.
- Select if you let the PMT generate the needed ssl certificates or if you wish to customize the certificate attributes.
- Select some more certificate attributes like validity and the common name.
- Define the network ports Websphere uses. Usually no changes required here.
- 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.
- 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.
- Step 12 shows a summary if the selected configurations. Click "Create" to start the creation process.
<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>