Configuring IBM Process Designer to connect to a different virtual server

As you all know, the IBM Process Designer needs a Process Center to connect to (the binding is shown on the figure below). Sometimes it might be handy to know how to switch one process center to another (e.g. different virtual images with the IBM software).

This howto supposes you are using IBM Process Designer 8.5. and Windows 7 as you guest OS.

IBM BPM Components structure, resource: www-304.ibm.com

It's pretty simple. IBM Process Designer (former Lombardi) is based on eclipse. That means it has eclipse.ini file for configurations. One of the configuration is also the Process Center URL to connect to. The eclipse.ini file is usually located in the root folder of the BPM software (e.g. c:\IBM\ProcessDesigner\v8.5\eclipse.ini if you are running it on windows).

This is what you need to do to switch for another Process Center:
1] find out the IP of your server machine.
1.1] Login to the server where Process Center Server is running.
1.2] use cmd and ipconfig commands to find out the IP;

2] check your hosts config (on windows: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc)
2.1] In order the BPD to work correctly you need to have the following line:

• <the server IP>  ibmbpm

This is how it could look like if you IP would be 192.168.29.131:

• 192.168.29.131        ibmbpm

This tells your system that when you enter "ibmbpm" into a browser, you want to connect to the specified IP.

3] check your eclipse.ini (rather in WordPad instead of notepad)
It should contain the following line:

• -Dcom.ibm.bpm.processcenter.url=https://ibmbpm:9443

This tells the BPD to expect the Process Center on ibmbpm, port 9443. Remember that we have set up "ibmbpm" to be interpreted as the IP of our Process Center Server.

Whomp! thats it. You can now run your BPD with the new Process Center attached.