Use of server groups in City Cloud

In City Cloud OpenStack you can use server groups to control the scheduling of a group of servers. A server group can have two different policys - affinity and anti-affinity.

A server group with policy affinity will make sure that all the server in that group will be placed at the same compute host (hypervisor). A suitable use case for this can be when hosting services that are tightly connected and frequently communicating with each other. 

A server group with the policy set to anti-affinity will make sure that none of the servers within that server group always will be placed at different compute host (hypervisor). This is a suitable use case for services that requires high availability, for example a database cluster, where a potential problem of one of the hypervisors won't affect the uptime of the service if self.

Step-by-step guide using OpenStack Client

Create server group and set policy 

  • openstack server group create --policy <policy (affinity/anti-affinity)> <name>

Apply server group to server group at creation 

  • openstack server create --image <image> --flavor <flavor> --network <network> --hint group=<server group name> <server name>


IMPORTANT: Servers can only be delegated to a server group at the time of server creation!