Liferay IDE provides several Liferay specific server adapters to use for the Server/Runtime configuration in Eclipse. These Server/Runtimes are specfically for the Liferay Portal Tomcat bundles for community edition version of Liferay Portal. Once you have configured a Liferay server you can use it for launching a local running copy of Liferay server and deploy Liferay projects (plugins) to it.