Installing WXS 8.x for WCS7 on WIN7

With the release of WXS 8.x, installation and upgrade process of eXtreme scale has moved to Installation Manager, I was trying to upgrade my local toolkits embedded WAS test environment to the latest version of eXtreme scale client and as expected had to encounter tons of issues.

The screen shot below shows the error you would receive if you proceed to install eXtreme scale client on WAS Test environment using installation Manager

To fix the issue follow these steps.

Step 1:

Installation Manager needs to be made aware of installed WAS 7.X test server, this is a mandatory step before you proceed to install eXtreme Scale client version 8.x and above.

By default Installation Manager does not support import profile option, to enable this follow these steps.

Edit C:\ProgramData\IBM\Installation Manager\.settings\com.ibm.cic.agent.core.prefs

and add following entry

com.ibm.cic.common.core.preferences.import.enabled=true

If you are making use of non Administrator account on WIN7 ensure that the user that you are working with has all types of pemission of the folder/files.

Step 2:

Launch IBM Installation Manager, you should be now able to see a import icon as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 3:

Add following in File → Preferences → Repositories

http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/websphere/repositories/repository.config

I encountered another error in this step, the screen would error out with following message "An internal error occurred during: "Finishing...".

On reviewing the log from following location it appeared that it received a bunch of null pointer exception.
C:\ProgramData\IBM\Installation Manager\pluginState\.metadata

To resolve this issue simply restart InstallationManager and redo the steps again, Following IBM technote has more details on this exception.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21616003




Step 4:

WXS client  does not support an upgrade option hence If you already have WXS client added to the WCS WAS profile you will have to uninstall it first.

We can find the uninstall script for WXS under following folder ..\SDP\runtimes\base_v7\uninstall_wxs

Step 5:

We should be able to install WXS client 8.x from Installation Manager now. Make sure repository.config file for WXS 8.x is mapped on Installation Manager and proceed with the installation.

Once the installation is done validate the client version from WAS admin console.

Reference:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/itshelp/v3r0/topic/com.ibm.its_installation.doc/topics/t_IM_importing_was_into_im.html