Groups

Managed hosts are assigned to and identified with groups. If you send a job to a group, all hosts in the group receive the job simultaneously. Sun Update Connection – Enterprise has two types of groups: user-defined groups and default groups.

User-Defined Groups

Create groups to make a large Sun Update Connection – Enterprise system more efficient. Groups enable you to simultaneously and consistently control managed hosts of similar functions and to prevent inappropriate configurations.

A User-defined group can hold as many hosts as you choose. Such a group can be comprised of mixed or homogeneous operating systems and can be nested within other groups.

Default Groups

A default group is system-defined collection of hosts and cannot be deleted or edited.

• All Hosts group. Contains all managed hosts. Every machine with an installed agent automatically belongs to this group.

• Distribution groups. Contains all hosts of a particular distribution and hardware platform. When an Agent registers with the SDS, it is identified by its operating system (specific Linux or Solaris distribution) and assigned to the group of agents with the same distribution and hardware platform.

For example, you install the agent on five Red Hat 8.0 Intel 32-bit machines. The agents rise. In the console you see a group called RH8_IA32 Hosts, and the five machines are listed under it. You install the agent on another five machines with SLES 9 on Power 64-bit. When the agents rise, you see a new group, SLES9_PPC64 Hosts, and it contains the five machines.

Updated Groups in Jobs

If you set a job to start at a single future date, any change in the host list of the group is reflected in the list of hosts that run the job.

For example, you select a group of five hosts to receive a job scheduled for the first of the next month. Before the job runs, you add two hosts to the group. When the first of the month comes, the job is sent to the seven hosts in the selected group.

If you set a job to a recurring schedule, you can add hosts to the group, and the next run of the job will be sent to the new host list. You cannot remove hosts from the group.

Say you reschedule the job of the previous example to be a recurring job for the first of each month. Before the next month, you want to remove four hosts from the group. When you attempt to do so, you receive an error message. You must delete the recurring job before you can edit the group.

Hosts and Groups in the Hosts List

To view the Hosts list, make sure the Inventory panel is open in the main window. From the View menu, choose Inventory.

The Hosts list displays default and user-defined groups, and their hosts. The distribution groups appear under the All Hosts group and contain only those distributions that are represented by managed hosts whose agents have risen and automatically registered their hosts with the system dependency server. Every group has a number next to it, which indicates how many hosts are in that group.

See Hosts List for explanations of the Hosts List columns and status icons.