Organizing Servers Into Logical Member Groups

This topic explains how to organize VMware Tanzu GemFire servers into logical member groups.

In a client/server configuration, you can control which servers your clients use and target specific servers for specific data or tasks by putting servers into logical member groups. You can configure servers to manage different data sets or to direct specific client traffic to a subset of servers, such as those directly connected to a back-end database.

You can also define member groups to deploy JARs in parallel or to perform administrative commands across a member group.

To add servers to a member group, you can configure the following:

Add the member group names to the gemfire.properties file for the server. For example:
```
groups=Portfolios,ManagementGroup1
```
A server can belong to more than one member group. If specifying multiple group membership for the server, use a comma-separated list. Alternatively, if you are using the gfsh command interface to start up the server, provide a group name as a parameter:
```
gfsh>start server --name=server1 \
--group=Portfolios,ManagementGroup1
```

To configure a client to connect to a specific member group, modify the client’s cache.xml file to define a distinct pool for each server-group and assign the pools to the corresponding client regions:

<pool name="PortfolioPool" server-group="Portfolios" ...
  <locator host="lucy" port="41111">
  ...
</pool>
   ...
<region name="clientRegion" ... 
  <region-attributes pool-name="PortfolioPool" ...