This is a notes page, extended with tips & tricks. This page is not really documentation, just stuff for me to remember. Sometimes things will get removed from these pages and turned into real documentation, sometimes not. You might find these notes to come in hand, maybe not. For me, it's just things I don't want to forget.

source

1. Cell
2. Deployment Manager
3. Node
4. Node Agent
5. Cluster
6. Server

A Cell is a virtual unit that is built of a Deployment Manager and one or more nodes:
Another word for a Cell is a (WebSphere) Domain

The Deployment Manager is a process (in fact it is an special WebSphere instance) responsible for managing the installation and maintenance of applications, connection pools and other resources related to a J2EE environment. It is also responsible for centralizing user repositories for application and also for WebSphere authentication and authorization.
The Deployment Manager communicates with the Nodes through another special WebSphere process, the Node Agent.

The Node is another virtual unit that is built of a Node Agent and one or more Server instances.

The Node Agent is the process responsible for spawning and killing server processes and also responsible for configuration synchronization between the Deployment Manager and the Node.

Servers are regular Java process responsible for serving J2EE requests (eg.: serving JSP/JSF pages, serving EJB calls, consuming JMS queues, etc).

And to finish, Clusters are also virtual units that groups Servers so resources added to the Cluster are propagated to every Server that makes up the cluster, this will in fact affect usually more than a single Node instance.

On this picture you can see a complete overview of the concepts. Note that the entire cell can run on a single physical box, or can be devided over multiple physical boxes:

The WebSphere default ports are noted in the IBM documentation.

All server endpoint addresses are stored in $WAS_HOME/config/cells/<cell name>/nodes/<node name>/serverindex.xml

For a project I'm assigned to I'm looking for information on how to migrate WebSphere 6.1 profiles to a different host, and how to change the directory structure. To move the profile to a different host I found a (good) article which describes a way:
The WebSphere Contrarian: Changing host names and migrating profiles in WebSphere Application Server The article also mentiones that with WebSphere 6.1 you can better leave your directory structure the same but in this project that's not possible. We now have multiple WebSphere hosts all set up in the same way, but now we have to merge the profiles to one new server.
Wikipedia explanation of wsadmin

• List profile information

bash-3.2# ./manageprofiles.sh
The available modes are: create, augment, delete, unaugment, deleteAll, listProfiles, getName, getPath, validateRegistry, validateAndUpdateRegistry, getDefaultName, setDefaultName, backupProfile, restoreProfile, response, help
For detailed help on each mode enter: -<mode> -help. For example, -create -help.
Command-line arguments are case sensitive.

bash-3.2# ./manageprofiles.sh -listProfiles
[wsbox2.dmgr, wsbox2.AppSrv, wsbox1.dmgr, wsbox1.AppSrv]

bash-3.2# ./manageprofiles.sh -validateRegistry
All of the profiles in the registry are valid.

bash-3.2# ./manageprofiles.sh -getPath -profileName wsbox2.dmgr
/opt/was-2/WAS_Profiles/wsbox2.dmgr

• Create profile

./manageprofiles.sh -create -templatePath /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profileTemplates/default
   -profileName wsbox3 -profilePath /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/wsbox3