Server groups provide a way of organizing your Crystal Enterprise servers to make them easier to manage. That is, when you manage a group of servers, you need only view a subset of all the servers on your system. More importantly, server groups are a powerful way of customizing Crystal Enterprise to optimize your system for users in different locations, or for objects of different types.
If you group your servers by region, you can easily set up default processing settings, recurrent schedules, and schedule destinations that are appropriate to users who work in a particular regional office. You can associate an object with a single server group, so the object is always processed by the same servers. And you can associate scheduled objects with a particular server group to ensure that scheduled objects are sent to the correct printers, file servers, and so on. Thus, server groups prove especially useful when maintaining systems that span multiple locations and multiple time zones.
If you group your servers by type, you can configure objects to be processed by servers that have been optimized for those objects. For example, processing servers need to communicate frequently with the database containing data for published reports. Placing processing servers close to the database server that they need to access improves system performance and minimizes network traffic. Therefore, if you had a number of reports that ran against a DB2 database, you might want to create a group of Page Servers that process reports only against the DB2 database server. If you then configured the appropriate reports to always use this Page Server group for viewing, you would optimize system performance for viewing these reports.
After creating server groups, configure objects to use specific server groups for scheduling, or for viewing and modifying reports. For details, see Specifying servers for scheduling or Specifying servers for viewing and modification. You can change the status, obtain metrics, and configure your servers in the Server Groups management area—just as you would in the Servers management area. The only difference is that you see only the servers that you added to the server group.
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