Installing BPM 8 Process Center Advanced on RHEL 5 Silently

IBM recently released BPM version 8.0. In line with this new version, I had the opportunity to install BPM 8 Process Center Advanced on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine. To start off, there were really no difference in the installation procedure from the previous version (BPM 7.5). The information center provides a more detailed procedure on how to do this but here's how I installed it. Note that this is just base installation and I haven't created the profiles yet. I'll write about profile creation later on.

Pre-installation Steps:

1. Login as root

2.  Use a text editor or vi to modify /etc/security/limits.conf and insert/modify the nofile parameter

* hard nofile 8800

* soft nofile 8800

3. Set umask value

umask 022

4. Restart the server

init 6

5. Transfer BPM images to the server. I used the following directory for this example:

/opt/BPM8

6. Extract the BPM images to a directory. I ran the following commands to extract the images to /opt/installers/bpm

cd /opt/installers/bpm

tar -zxvf /opt/BPM8/BPM_Adv_V800_Linux_x86_1_of_3.tar.gz

tar -zxvf /opt/BPM8/BPM_Adv_V800_Linux_x86_2_of_3.tar.gz

tar -zxvf /opt/BPM8/BPM_Adv_V800_Linux_x86_3_of_3.tar.gz

Once the images are extracted you can proceed in creating your response file. Create a copy of the file /opt/installers/bpm/responsefiles/BPM/template_response.xml. Based on that file, specify the following fragments:

I modified the repository location from a relative path to the full path of the BPM installers. I also change repos_32bit to repos_64bit since I was installing on a 64bit machine.

<server>
 <repository location='/opt/installers/bpm/IM/' temporary='true'/>
 <repository location="/opt/installers/bpm/repository/repos_64bit/" />
</server>

I specified the Installation Manager location to /apps/IBM/InstallationManager

<profile kind='self' installLocation='/apps/IBM/InstallationManager' id='IBM Installation Manager'>
 <data key='eclipseLocation' value='/apps/IBM/InstallationManager'/>
 <data key="cic.selector.nl" value="en" />
</profile>

I specified the BPM installation location to /apps/IBM.WebSphere/ProcServer. I also removed the DB2 Express element because I didn't want to install the DB2 9.7 Express. Change 32bit to 64bit.

<profile installLocation='/apps/IBM/WebSphere/ProcServer' id='IBM Business Process Manager Advanced'>
 <data key='eclipseLocation' value='/apps/IBM/WebSphere/ProcServer' />
 .
 .
 <data key='user.select.64bit.image,com.ibm.websphere.ND.v80' value='true'/>
</profile>

I removed the DB2 Express element, used the 64bit offering: com.ibm.sdk.6_64bit, and specified "wps.client.feature,wps.server.feature,bpmAdv.nonprod" as features to install. Note that bpmAdv.nonprod is used for development and test environment. Then, bpmAdv.prod is used for production environment.

<install>
 <offering profile="IBM Business Process Manager Advanced" id="com.ibm.websphere.ND.v80" features='core.feature,ejbdeploy,thinclient,embeddablecontainer,samples,com.ibm.sdk.6_64bit'/>  
 <offering profile="IBM Business Process Manager Advanced" id="com.ibm.bpm.ADV.V80" features='wps.client.feature,wps.server.feature,bpmAdv.nonprod'/> 
</install>

I also specified the eclipse cache location as such:

<preference value="/apps/IBM/SDPShared" name="com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.eclipseCache" />

Once I was done modifying the response file template, I saved it under /opt/installers/responsefiles/ as install_response.xml After saving the response file, I executed the following command:

/opt/installers/bpm/IM/installc -acceptLicense input /opt/installers/responsefiles/install_response.xml -log /opt/installers/logs/silent_install.log

Note, that all the above steps are done using the root user. You may want to assign a user permissions to the directories that were used.

For a more more information on installing BPM 8.0, checkout the following links:

• IBM Business Process Manager 8.0 Announcement
• IBM Business Process Manager 8.0 Information Center