IBM Business Process Manager supports the concept of environments. Each environment is used for a specific purpose that is determined by the type of the environment. Figure 6-2 shows a typical setup of IBM Business Process Manager with a development, test, staging, and production environment.

The Process Center is a core component in IBM Business Process Manager, as it contains the central BPM repository. It is the only environment where artifacts of Process Applications and Toolkits can be created and edited.

Process Center Serve acts as the development environment and is automatically assigned the development environment type.

The development environment is the only environment where you cannot specify the environment type, and in contrast to other environment types, you can have only one environment as the development environment.

The Process Center Server is intended to be used during application development by the BPM solution developers. It is important that you use this environment according to its purpose and that you do not use it for hosting your production process applications.

Apart from a development environment, a typical BPM setup contains one or more runtime servers. It should at least contain a production environment, but usually contains additional environments for special purposes.

Unlike the Process Center Server, Process Servers need to be associated with the Process Center during or after the creation of the server (profile creation). Runtime servers can be configured as:

• Online server/connected server
  Online servers are directly connected to the Process Center. Application deployments to online servers can be performed from the Process Center console. Usually, test and staging environments are configured as online servers.
• Offline server
  Offline servers are not connected to the Process Center. Usually, production environments are configured as offline servers.