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Creating Server Groups

Create server groups to organize your hybrid standalone servers for easier management and deployment.

A server group is a set of servers that act as a single deployment target for applications so that you don’t have to deploy applications to each server individually.

Understanding Server Groups

Deploying applications to servers in server groups provides redundancy so you can restore applications more seamlessly and quickly, with less downtime.

Unlike clusters, application instances in a server group run in isolation from the application instances running on the other servers in the group. If you experience concurrency issues with server groups, consider grouping servers in clusters.

Understanding Server Groups and Mule Apps Behavior

When you deploy Mule applications to a server group, these behaviors apply:

Application Deployment and Updates

  • When you add a Mule application to a server group, it deploys to all servers in the group automatically.

  • When you update a Mule application in a server group, the update applies to all servers in the group. Review these considerations for server updates:

    • Servers with Unknown status are not updated until they reconnect to the MuleSoft control plane.

    • You can only update a Mule application once if servers in the group have Unknown status.

    • If you update a Mule application (for example, from version 1 to version 2) while servers have Unknown status, you can’t perform additional updates (such as from version 2 to version 3) until you remove the unknown servers from the server group or start and reconnect the unknown servers to the control plane.

  • When you delete a Mule application from a server group, it removes the application from all servers in the group.

Manually managing Mule applications directly on servers that belong to a server group is not recommended and defeats the purpose of using server groups.

If you manually modify the applications directory (apps) on a server that belongs to a server group, the following issues occur:

  • Adding applications directly
    If you manually add a .jar file to a server’s apps folder, the application deploys only to that specific server and becomes a rogue API that is not visible in Runtime Manager’s server group view and is not deployed to other servers in the group.

  • Updating applications directly
    If you manually update a Mule application by deleting the previous version and dropping a new .jar file, the same issues as adding applications directly apply.

  • Deleting applications directly
    If you manually delete a Mule application folder (including the anchor file), the API is deleted, but since you didn’t remove the application from the server group, it redeploys when you restart the server.

Before You Begin

Before creating server groups, ensure that you have:

  • At least one hybrid standalone server configured

  • Appropriate permissions to create and manage server groups

  • Access to Runtime Manager

Requirements and Limitations

Additionally, review these requirements and limitations:

All servers in a server group must be running the same versions of:

  • Mule runtime engine

  • Runtime Manager agent

  • Java

  • You can create a server group with servers with the Running or the Disconnected status, but these can’t be in the same group as servers with the Created status.

  • You can create a server group with servers with the Created status.

  • To add a server on which existing applications are currently running to a server group, first stop and delete the applications from the server.

Create a Server Group

When creating a server group, you can either:

  • Add the servers to Runtime Manager first and then create the server group.

  • Create the group and add servers to it later.

To create a server group:

  1. From Anypoint Platform, select Runtime Manager.

  2. Select Servers.

  3. Click Create Group.

  4. In the Create Server Group page, enter the name for the server group.

    Group names can contain between 3-40 alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) and hyphens (-). They can’t start or end with a hyphen, and they can’t contain spaces or other characters.

  5. Select the servers to include in your new server group.

  6. Click Create Group.

    • The new server group appears in the Servers list.

    • The servers no longer appear in the Servers list.

To see the list of servers in the group, select the server group name.

Next Steps

After creating server groups, you can:

  • Deploy applications to the entire group

  • Configure monitoring and alerts at the group level

  • Manage properties and settings across all servers in the group