Types of Profiles in the WAS

Environment Type	Description
Cell	A cell environment creates two profiles; a management profile with a deployment manager (Dmgr) and an application server profile. The application server is federated to the cell of the deployment manager. These profiles will be created using the DMGR and Node (AppSrv) profiles.
Management	A management profile provides the server and services for managing multiple application server environments. The administrative agent manages application servers on the same machine. The Network Deployment edition also includes a deployment manager for tightly coupled management and a job manager for loosely coupled management of topologies distributed over multiple machines.
Application server	An application server environment runs your enterprise applications. WebSphere Application Server is managed from its own administrative consoles and functions independently from all other application servers.
Custom profile	A custom profile contains an empty node, which doesn't contain an administrative console or servers. The typical use for a custom profile is to federate its node to a deployment manager. After federating the node, use the deployment manager to create a server or a cluster of servers with the node or nodes. Custom profiles options also allows you to override default IBM naming conventions during the profile creation wizard process.