The Role of Server Groups in App-V 4

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The Role of Server Groups in App-V 4

Server groups are for configuring a server or server farm to have alternate provider policies, server-centric application management, and/or alternate logging pipelines to databases.

Provider Policies

Provider policies are bound to users and servers by way of server groups. Provider Policies can control client configuration for:

  • Publishing/Refresh Intervals
  • In prior versions of Softgrid, this also controlled Authentication methods. This has been deprecated in 4.5. Only Windows Authentication is supported
  • Type of License enforcement

Some Administrators would rather manage their provider policies by server as opposed to simply user groups, therefore they use this method. After creation of the server group object, an administrator can then associate an alternate provider policy with the server group:

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Provider Policies can also toggle application usage on and off. Alternate Pipelines for logs can control excessive database traffic going out on the WAN

 

Application Association and Management

You can also associate applications with a specific server group:

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Assigning applications to a specific server group involves configuring the application itself for server group membership. You will then see the application show up under the “Applications” tab in the properties of the server group.

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The applications tab is for informational purposes only to determine a quick view of which applications associated with each server group are currently enabled.

Logging

Once you create a server group, you can also use this to control the pipeline for logging. This will require at least one server object to reside in the group. This has to originate as a pre-created server object. You can pre-create a server object by right-clicking the server group and selecting “New Application Virtualization Management Server.”

Once your servers have been configured/installed inside the server group, you can control the log pipeline methodology (although the options are more limited starting with version 4.5 and later. While the “File” option is available in the interface, it no longer works on versions 4.5 and later. The only log type supported is SQL Database.

By default, the destination is the AppVirt Database using the same SQL server that was specified when the database was first created during the installation of the first App-V server. The default event type is “Warnings/Errors.”

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Given the potential growth of the MESSAGE_LOG table inside the SQL data store and the additional web traffic it can create, some App-V server administrators will leverage local datastores for logging while using a central App-V datastore for application and overall management control. Each server can then send these messages to that server’s MESSAGE_LOG table.