Service Groups in Clustered Installations
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.
Use the Deployment menu to create a service group. Select and then create a new service. For more information, refer to the documentation about creating service configurations.