Configuring server groups
A server group consists of one or more servers that share the same database and are designated as part of a server group. Server groups are automatically managed. That is, a server is automatically added to the server group. Also, a server cannot be non-server group member. Server groups are designed to provide failover operations for crucial operations. They can also provide scalability and load balancing.
AR System servers in a server group
(Click the image to expand it.)
To ensure high availability of BMC Remedy AR System operations, you can set up a server group to provide failover protection by assigning rankings to servers in the group for specific BMC Remedy AR System operations.
Servers in a server group can provide failover protection for the following functions:
- Administrative operations
- Archiving
- Assignment Engine
- BMC Atrium CMDB
- Atrium Integration
- BMC Remedy Approval Server
- BMC Remedy Distributed Server Option (DSO)
- BMC Remedy Email Engine
- BMC Remedy Flashboards
- BMC SLM Collector (a component of BMC Service Level Management)
- Business Rules Engine (a component of BMC Service Level Management)
- Escalations
- Full Text Indexing
- Reconciliation Engine
A server group can also provide ease of administration because it has only one database to manage and back up. In addition, AR System servers that belong to a server group share all licenses except BMC Remedy AR System server licenses. One server in the group is designated as the administrative server. When you change workflow and applications on this server, the changes are automatically propagated to other servers in the group. In a server group environment, when the Admin server is down and the secondary server has not picked up the Admin server operations, requests pending from Hierarchical Group might accumulate.
You can also configure specific servers in the group to handle reporting, reconciliation, and other tasks that can impact performance, freeing up the remaining servers in the group to handle user traffic.
For assigning administrative or specialized operations to a specific server, you must define a unique name for each server in the server group. Also, each server group must have a common server name alias to identify itself in a workflow. For more information, see Server group naming.
A server group can provide load balancing for heavy user traffic. You can use a hardware load balancer with a server group to direct user traffic to some or all servers in the group. See Configuring a hardware load balancer with BMC Remedy AR System.
Server group functionality is not supported for multiple servers on one computer, and servers earlier than release 6.0 are not compatible with server groups.
The following topics provide detailed information about how to configure server groups:
- Configuring the server group check interval
- Setting failover rankings for servers and operations
- Signaling mechanism in a server group
- Configuring full text search for a server group
- Configuring DSO for a server group
- Configuring the Email Engine for a server group
- Configuring flashboards for server groups
- Bypassing the load balancer to work on a specific server
- Using data archiving with server groups
- Adding a server to a server group
- Server group naming
- Understanding Server group operations
Comments
What if a server needs to be removed from a server group? Could a link for that be added?
Thank you!
Hello Brian,
To remove a server from the server group, remove the particular server entry from the following forms:
Delete entry from AR System Configuration Component, AR System Configuration Component-Setting Mapping, and AR System Configuration Setting.
To remove a server from the server group, remove the particular server entry from the following tables:
For more information, see the latest documentation on Configuring server groups or the Knowledge article on BMC communities.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Anagha
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