Configuring server groups

Server groups are designed to provide failover operations for crucial operations. They can also provide scalability and load balancing.

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.

A server cannot be non-server group member. Also, you cannot run a server in the standalone mode that points to the same database as that of the server group.

To ensure high availability of AR System operations, you can set up a server group to provide failover protection by assigning rankings to servers in the group for specific AR System operations.

Servers in a server group can provide failover protection for the following functions:

• Administrative operations
• Archiving
• Assignment Engine
• BMC Helix CMDB
• Atrium Integrator
• Approval Server
• Distributed Server Option (DSO)
• Email Engine
• 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 server that belong to a server group share all licenses except 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-AR-System.

Server group functionality is not supported for multiple servers on one computer.

Removing a server from the server group

You can remove a server from the server group simply by removing the particular server entry from the following forms and tables. However, make sure that the server you are removing from the server group is not pointing to the database same as the server group.

To remove a server from the server group, remove the particular server entry from the following forms:

• AR System Server Group Operation Ranking
• Centralized Configuration Server
  Delete entry from AR System Configuration Component, AR System Configuration Component-Setting Mapping, and AR System Configuration Setting.
• AR System Java Plugin Deploy Status
• AR System Monitor
• UDM:Config
• AR System Server to Key Map
• AR System Key Store
• AR System Single Point Deployment Status
• UDM:RAppPassword

To remove a server from the server group, remove the particular server entry from the following tables:

• servgrp_config
• servgrp_board
• servgrp_ftslic
• servgrp_applic
• servgrp_resources
• servgrp_userlic
• upgrade_tracker

The following topics provide detailed information about how to configure server groups: