Dispatchers and bridges

The BMC Release Package and Deployment (RPD) automation server communicates with its agents and initiates all communication to perform the ad hoc and scheduled tasks. Product agents are software programs that listen to and execute the instructions sent from the application to the managed servers. RPD 5.0 provides you with two types of agents:

• Bridges: Bridges are lightweight agents that need to be installed on each managed server to address the RPD automation server requests. In RPD 4.4 and later versions, bridge agents differ from old legacy bridge agents of the previous versions. The bridge agents of 4.4 and later versions are running on different port, as compared to legacy bridges.

  Note

  By default, BRPD 5.0 uses new bridges. If you do not plan to upgrade to the new bridges, set the additional legacy_bridge_mode property with the value y under System > Properties. This enables you to use the new RPD 5.0 version with your legacy bridges.
  However, BMC recommends you to upgrade to the version 5.0 features to benefit from the use of remote repositories. Note that you cannot use new and legacy bridges at the same time.

• Dispatchers: Dispatchers are agents that work on top of another protocol. By using dispatchers you avoid installing and running a dispatcher agent on each managed server. Instead, a central dispatcher communicates with targets, using the Network Shell (NSH) protocol or other protocols—such as SSH, Chef, or Puppet—to perform the actual automation tasks on those targets. However, ensure that on each managed server you installed protocol-specific agents (for example, for the NSH protocol—RSCD agents, for the SSH protocol—openSSH agents, and so on)

  Note

  Dispatchers process folders in the same way as bridges. Therefore, during instance creation, the dispatch_fileget action fetches all files from the folder, excluding the folder itself. If you want the dispatcher to process the folders the old way (including the folder, as in the pre-4.4 versions), set the DISPATCH_FILEGET_FOLDER_INCLUDE property either as a global property under System > Servers or as a server or package property.

Both bridges and dispatcher agents are part of a single software module, which simplifies code maintenance, increases flexibility, and decreases the time needed to deliver new features to the market. Therefore, product agents work in both bridge and dispatch mode. You can define the mode in which you want to communicate with the agent by configuring the server correspondingly.

For both bridge and dispatcher agent types BRPD supports copying of files and folders through the remote storage. In addition, both regular and remote package references are supported. For more information, see Remote-storage and Remote-reference.

Related topics

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