Overview of Server Groups

The Server Groups feature is useful for gathering servers into collections. These groups can be used as a shortcut for performing the same action on all of the servers simultaneously, instead of performing the action on each individual server, one at a time. Server groups can also be used to simply organize groups of servers.

Server groups can be comprised of individual servers as well as other server groups.

• Uses for Server Groups
• Permissions Required for Working with Server Groups
• Characteristics of Server Groups

Uses for Server Groups

Some recommended uses for server groups include:

• Grouping servers by OS version
• Grouping servers by customer
• Grouping servers by facility
• Grouping servers by deployment stage
• Grouping servers by use (Server Use in the Server Properties page)
• Grouping servers by operational boundaries, for example, grouping together all servers that require identical application configuration
• Grouping servers by access control boundaries, for example, creating server groups that are associated with a specific User Group

Permissions Required for Working with Server Groups

Users must have the permissions shown in the following table in order to perform specific tasks related to server groups. Only administrators can set permissions.

Permissions Required for Working with Server Groups

Name Of Permission	Where Selected	Enables You To:
Manage Servers		Create, edit, and delete private server groups, both static and dynamic.
Manage Public Server Groups	The Manage Servers Permissions section on the Other tab in Users and Groups	Create, edit, and delete public server groups, both static and dynamic.
Model Public Server Groups	The Manage Servers Permissions section on the Other tab in Users and Groups	Model public server groups. See Public Group Modeling for more information.
Allow Run Refresh Jobs	The Manage Servers Permissions section on the Other tab in Users and Groups	Add or remove servers from groups before a scheduled job is run. This permission gives you the option to refresh group membership before a job is run so that it is only run on the servers that belong to the group when the job is actually run.

Characteristics of Server Groups

When using server groups, groups have the following characteristics:

• Individual servers can be included in as many groups as you want, or not included in any groups.
• Adding servers to a group does not remove those servers from the list of all servers that appears when you click Servers > Manage Servers in the navigation panel.
• Groups can contain servers and subgroups.
• Server groups are hierarchical (they can be nested) with these caveats:
  • Private and public groups cannot be mixed in a hierarchy, but static and dynamic groups can.
    
    See Types of Server Groups for more information about private and public groups.
  • The rules for a dynamic group are not inherited from a parent dynamic group to a dynamic subgroup.
    
    See Dynamic Groups for more information about the characteristics of dynamic groups.
  • Groups do not inherit modeling data from their parents, including custom attributes.
  • When you run an operation on a group that contains nested groups, the operation also applies to all the servers in the nested groups below the current group.
  • When an Application Configuration operation within the SA Client is applied to groups, and those groups contain subgroups, the operation does not apply to all the servers in the subgroups. It only applies to the group upon which the operation was directly applied.