Service Groups in GIS

FTP Client adapter is considered a non-clusterable adapter and should instead be set up in a group.
Non-clusterable adapters can be grouped together using service groups and accessed as a single entity. These adapters include:

• FTP server adapter
• HTTP server adapter
• FTP client adapter
• HTTP client adapter
• Connect:Direct adapter
• Connect:Enterprise adapter
• B2B Communication adapter

Here is how to create a service group for protocol adapters

Creating a Service Configuration

In some cases, you must create a configuration of the service you want to use. You can create many configurations from one service type.

Note: If you are using a MySQL database, do not create service configurations whose names begin with an accented character.

You can save your configuration at any point in the configuration process by clicking Save. You can then return to it later.

To create a service configuration:

1. From the Deployment menu, select Services > Configuration.
2. In the Services Configuration page, next to Create New Service, click Go!
3. Use the Tree View or List View to locate and select a service to configure, or type the full name of the service in the Service Type field. Click Next.
4. Type a unique and meaningful name and description for your configuration in the appropriate fields and click Next.
5. Select or create a service group for this service configuration, as needed. Selections are:
   
   • None - You do not want to include this configuration in a group at this time.
   • Create New Group - You can enter a name for a new group in this field, which will then be created along with this configuration.
   • Select Group - If you have already created one or more groups for this service type, they are displayed in the list. Select a group from the list.

For more information, see Using Service Groups.

6. Complete the fields specific to the service. See the documentation for a specific service for more information.
7. To enable this configuration for business processes, verify that Enable for Business Processes is selected.
8. In the Confirm page, verify the information about the service configuration you created, and then click Finish to add it to Gentran Integration Suite.
9. To determine if additional configuration is necessary, see the documentation for the specific service. You may need to specify additional parameters for some services using the Service Editor in the GPM.

Using Service Groups

In Gentran Integration Suite, you can create groups of service configurations. A group can only contain service configurations of one service type. A service group is a set of service configurations of the same service type that can act as peers (can be configured to perform the same activity in the same setting). In some situations, using a service group instead of a single service configuration can be an effective way to do load balancing and failover processing. For example, you might have many trading partners submitting data that gets collected by a File System adapter on your Gentran Integration Suite system. Because this might cause a bottleneck when processing the incoming data, you could create a group of File System adapters and use the group in your business process, instead of just one File System adapter. As a result, Gentran Integration Suite can balance the incoming data load across all the File System adapters in the group.This can reduce wait times, free up system resources, and provide failover capability - if one File System adapter fails, the other File System adapters in the group can still process requests.

Load balancing and failover in a cluster can be helped by service groups, which are groups of services or adapters of the same type that can act as peers and share the load. More than one service instance of the same service/adapter type can be configured and placed within a service group. Thus, all adapters in a service group are viewed as a single entity and a service group name (instead of the service instance name) is referenced in the business process.

In a cluster environment, the service group does a round robin of all adapters on a per node basis. Each node handles its own load balancing across all adapters belonging to the service group. If a service group detects failure of a specific adapter, it goes out to get a good one, thus providing not only load balancing but also failover.

Adapters that cannot be configured on every cluster node (because of resource constraints or connectivity to external systems) can be deployed one per node and placed on a service group. The business process can be configured to use a service group instead of a service instance, thus attaining clusterable adapters deployed on all nodes, facilitating failover and load balancing.

Here are some important concepts about service groups:

• A service group can include only one service type. For example, a group can contain multiple configurations of the HTTP Server adapter, but cannot contain an HTTP Server adapter configuration and an FTP Server adapter configuration.
• Groups do not exist as actual entities in the system; groups are only stored as parameters in service configurations.
• The only way to create or edit a group is by creating or editing a service configuration.
• A service group cannot have the same name as an individual service or as another group, even if the group is for a different service type.
• To remove a service group from Gentran Integration Suite, simply remove all the service configurations from the group. Also, if you delete all the service configurations that are part of the group, the group no longer exists.
• Once a group no longer exists, you can reuse its name for a new service configuration or group.
• When writing BPML, to use a service group, refer to it in the same way that you would an individual service configuration. For example, if you had a service group named MyHTTPServers, you could use the statement <participant name="MyHTTPServers"/> in a business process.
• <assign to="FTPClientAdapter">FTPServiceGroup</assign>(actually FTPClientAdapter wil be there so change it to group which you created)
• <assign to="HTTPClientAdapter">HTTPServiceGroup</assign>
• In the GPM, you can see and select service groups from the config list, the same way that you would select one individual service configuration.

Bullet Points:

1) In the config list, service groups are not distinguished from individual service configurations

2) All adapters that use perimeter services are not clusterable so in our case FTP client, FTP server, HTTP server, HTTP client adapters,SFTP need to point to a specific node attached to the perimeter server to which they are connected. These can be grouped together using service groups to achieve load balancing/failover.

3) The other adapters which are not using perimeter services can point to “All” under a service group

4) We can create multiple adapters for FSA and can point to Environment “All” only when we use the shared file system

5) SAP adapter also not using perimeter services so we can point to “All” but there is one line in the documentation

   Licensing restrictions For example, the SAP and Web Methods Enterprise adapters might not be fully clustered across all server instances because of the licensing agreement.

Documentation Links :

http://www.sterlingcommerce.com/Documentation/Plat_IFC10/Content/Clustering/cluster_considerations.html

http://www.sterlingcommerce.com/Documentation/Plat_IFC10/Content/Clustering/cluster_architecture.html

http://www.sterlingcommerce.com/Documentation/Plat_IFC10/Content/Clustering/cluster_questions.html

Example screenshots