Environments and pools overview

Environments are sets of channels that represent some logical deployment stages with the organization, such as QA, Staging, and Production. Environments are the targets for deployments. Deployments into an environment are controlled by signoff lists. These lists identify who, if anyone, must authorize the deployment requests.

Processes are directly associated with environments. These associated processes enable configuration of the environment before any deployment activity occurs, and provide means to perform actions, depending on the success or failure of deployment into the environment.

Environment pools identify groups of channels within an environment that make a logical deployment target within that environment. You can deploy an individual pool or deploy all pools of an environment in a rolling manner. By default, the deployment within an environment is executed in a sequential manner, according to the order of the pools in the Pools section. However, you can specify a different deployment order. For more information about the deployment order options, see Deploying-to-an-environment-with-pool-definitions.

Use environment pools in the following circumstances:

• If the channels within the environment are managed by a load balancer and you want to do a rolling deployment for zero-downtime to the servers managed by the load balancer
• If a subset of the channels in the environment make a logical deployment target and you want to deploy to this set of channels independent of the others but still within the context of a deployment to the environment

Starting with BMC Release Package and Deployment version 4.3.01.10, you can group the environment pools to deploy all the pools within a group in parallel. If you group the pools, during the deployment the content will be deployed simultaneously to all the channels within the specified pools group. For more information, see Managing-pools-in-the-environment.