Service Engines are created within a group, which contains the definition of how the SEs must be sized, placed, and made highly available. This section discusses creating and configuring a service engine group.

Each cloud will have at least one SE group. The options within an SE group might vary based on the type of cloud they exist in and the cloud's settings, such as no access versus write access mode. SEs exist only within one group. Each group acts as an isolation domain. SE resources within an SE group can be moved around to accommodate virtual services, but SE resources are never shared between SE groups.

Any change made to an SE group,

  • Is applied immediately

  • Is only applied to SEs created after the changes are made

  • Changes to SE groups will take effect on any newly-created SEs, but existing SEs will retain the previous settings. The virtual service must be migrated to the new SEs to be affected by any changes to the SEG.

Multiple SE groups can exist within a cloud. A newly created virtual service will be placed on the default SE group. This can be changed through the Applications > Virtual Services page while creating a virtual service through the Advanced Setup wizard.

The Service Engine Group for a virtual service can be modified after a virtual service is deployed, however this operation is disruptive to traffic as the virtual service will be removed from the original Service Engine Group before being placed into the new Service Engine Group.

Note:

SE group properties are cloud-specific. Based on the cloud configuration, some of the properties discussed in this section may not be available.

To configure range of port numbers used to open backend server connections run the code below.

configure serviceenginegroupproperties 
configure serviceenginegroup Default-Group ephemeral_portrange_start 5000
configure serviceenginegroup [name] ephemeral_portrange_start 4096
configure serviceenginegroup [name] ephemeral_portrange_end 61440
Note:

By default, the start value is 4096 and the end value is 61440.

Primary SE in the View VS Tree

Starting with version 30.2.1, the Primary SE is marked in the View VS Tree as shown below: