Cluster member roles

In general, Guidewire application cluster contains servers (cluster members) that manage the following types of functionality.

Function	Description
Online processing	Server interactively manages requests from users logged into Guidewire PolicyCenter.
Background processing	Server manages batch process execution, work queue processing, message destination processing, lease management, and other similar items.

Guidewire categorizes each individual server instance in the cluster by its function, as defined by its role. In the base configuration, PolicyCenter defines server roles to handle the following functionality. In a typical installation, only those servers that support external requests such as user input use the ui server role.

Server function	Server role	Servers with these roles manage...
Online processing	`ui`	Interactions (user requests) between the PolicyCenter user interface and PolicyCenter itself. Web service calls; there is no distinct server role for web services. However, any cluster member that receives a web service request can process that request by default. Work queue processing, if there are distributed workers. Guidewire recommends that a server with the `ui` role handle these types of requests only during periods of low-load and during off-peak hours.
Background processing	`batch`	Batch scheduling. Batch process execution.
	`messaging`	Message destination processing.
	`scheduler`	Schedule handling.
	`startable`	Startable service management.
	`workqueue`	Work queue management, if there are distributed workers.

It is possible for multiple servers in the PolicyCenter clusters to have the same server role. Servers that have the same role type typically have similar resource allocations and configuration. Conversely, servers with different server role types typically have different workloads and allocate their resources differently.

Server roles and lease managers

Guidewire associates a specific lease manager type with each server role. Thus, a message destination lease manager on a server with the messaging role manages message destinations for that server.

Each Guidewire server contains all types of lease managers. However, a lease manager only becomes active on a server with a server role that matches its lease type.

Server role validation

PolicyCenter performs the following server role validation at server start up:

Validation of roles used in the application configuration files – If PolicyCenter detects the use of an unknown role in any of the configuration files, it throws an exception and refuses to start.
Validation of roles assigned a specific server – If PolicyCenter detects the assignment of an unknown role to a server, it prints a warning to the server log and ignores the unknown role.