Overview of Multicasting

Multicast communication is used to communicate among SAS middle-tier applications in a single SAS deployment (the set of applications connected to the same SAS Metadata Server). When installation is performed with the SAS Deployment Wizard, the wizard generates a default multicast address that is based on IP address of the SAS Metadata Server. The combination of multicast address and multicast UDP port number must be different for each SAS deployment and also different from any other multicast applications at your site.
The multicast communication includes all the information that is needed to bootstrap the SAS middle-tier applications. Because this information includes the SAS environment credentials (such as the sasadm account name and its password), time to live (TTL) and encryption options are provided to secure the multicast communication.
Multicast options are specified as JVM options. Multicast options provide the ability to tune and change the behavior of the multicast communication that occurs within the SAS deployment. The multicast address and UDP port number must match the values in the Web application server's start-up script (for example, SASServer1.bat) and the environment.properties file located in the SAS-config-dir\Lev1\Web\Applications\RemoteServices directory.
Administering multicast options typically involves the following:
  • setting options such as the multicast address
  • configuring security with a multicast authentication token
  • configuring the bind address that is used for multicast communication