What is Virtual Portal and and what are the steps for creating a Virtual Portal?

What is Virtual Portal ?

Virtual Portals (VP) are logical portals that share the same WebSphere Portal Server hardware and software installation. WebSphere portal gives its users the ability to create multiple portals on single installation. Virtual portal is same as base portal (WebSphere Portal) which can run on same JVM. We can have as many as 150 (Yes, it's 150 :-) ) virtual portals in single installation as long as the system has enough resources to run those number of VP's. Every VP has its own unique URL such as (http://localhost:10039/wps/myportal/finance, http://localhost:10039/wps/myportal/hr and many more where finance and hr are the 2 different virtual portals with different URL's). It will be separate in all respects but share the same system resources of the server. We can also create shared or scoped resources for different virtual portals.

When to use Virtual Portal ?

• If different departments in an enterprise want their own portal but they dont expect to use them heavily.
• It is highly recommended that even if the enterprise is going to use one portal per installation once should always create one VP and work on that rather than playing around with default base portal (i.e. WebSphere_Portal).

 You can create a virtual portal in 2 different ways :

1. By using Virtual Portal Manager Portlet
2. By using create-virtual-portal task

Steps for creating a Virtual Portal using Virtual Portal Manager Portlet

Below are the simple steps for creating a virtual portal:

1. Logon to Portal admin console http://localhost:10039/wps/myportal/

Manage Virtual Portals

2. Navigate to Virtual Portals -> Mange Virtual Portals at the bottom of console.

Manage Virtual Portals

Manage Virtual Portals

3. Click New Virtual portal and fill out the following information and click OK.

Title : VPortal
Description : Virtual Portal
URL Context : vpor
Host name : The host name of the virtual portal. This attribute is optional.
User realm : Leave it default or choose specific one you need (vpor)
Initial admin user group : Click search button besides it and click search on the next screen
and select one you need or select the default one. (wpsadmins)
Default theme : Select the default or leave it to IBM.

4. You will see a screen saying "Creating virtual portal..." and after few seconds virtual portal is created with the title specified above.

5. Click the portal created "VPortal" and you will see the the URL now changed with context we mentioned above i.e. /wps/myportal/vpor.

Manage Virtual Portals

Here we go, you now have created the virtual portal. You can also refer the below article from IBM on virtual portals for more detailed information. 
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wcmdoc/v6r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.lotus.wcm.doc/admin/advpref.html

Steps for creating a Virtual Portal using "create-virtual-portal" ConfigEngine task

We can use ConfigEngine task create-virtual-portal to create a virtual portal. This task will create a blank / empty virtual portal.

.\ConfigEngine.sh create-virtual-portal

Now If you want to use ConfigEngine task for creating a virtual portal then you have 2 options to set all the information required for creating a virtual portal.

Set all the configuration parameters on the command line using -D parameter

or 

Set all the values in \WebSphere\wp_profile\ConfigEngine\config\helpers\virtual_portal.properties file and pass absolute path of this properties file to ConfigEngine task using -DparentProperties=<Path of Properties file>