Planning your path through the installation documentation

The installation process for IBM® Business Process Manager, with its various components and potential configurations, supports many scenarios and topologies, ranging from a basic proof-of concept, demonstration, or test environment, to a mature distributed high-availability production environment. You might need some help with the many installation options.

The topics that you need as you work through your installation process are not necessarily together in the navigation tree and, depending on your search query, might not be easy to pick out in the search results.

To address this situation, use the Interactive Installation and Configuration Guide to generate a set of installation and configuration topics that are customized to your precise installation needs. In the Interactive Installation and Configuration Guide form, select the options you need for your installation scenario. As you select each option, the tool automatically removes options that are ruled out by your previous selections. For example, if you indicate that you plan to install on the AIX operating system, it removes the option to install a new instance of DB2 Express as part of the installation.

After you fill out the form, the tool generates a single topic containing all of the installation and configuration instructions that apply to your scenario. You can save and print these instructions so that they are sharable and portable. You can also go back, change your selections, and generate a new set of instructions. Each time you need to install product components with other options, return to the form and generate a new guide, or use the tool to see what the installation and configuration process looks like when you choose different options.

This following topics describe some of the options presented in the Interactive Installation and Configuration Guide form, the factors you should consider as you plan your installation process, and what causes some options not to be available. The Help me decide links in the form bring you to these topics, to help you understand the decisions you make and their impact on the resulting generated instructions.

The Interactive Installation and Configuration Guide options are not exhaustive. Some types of installation, for example installing into an existing WebSphere® Application Server instance, are supported and documented, but are not paths generated by the interactive guide tool. Browse the navigation or search the information center to find topics on these subjects.