Start-up Considerations for Clustered Deployments

SAS Micro Analytic Service is often deployed on a clustered application server to provide high availability and load balancing. Each node of the cluster can host one or more instances of SAS Micro Analytic Service as a web application.
Since SAS Micro Analytic Service uses a GemFire cache for communication between cluster nodes as well as persistence, there are some implications for scripts to start up or shut down member instances. Upon starting up a GemFire cache, cluster members negotiate and determine the member that has the latest persisted copy of the cache. In order to do this, all members must be available.
Therefore, any start-up script must start all cluster members in parallel and not in sequence. For the Windows platform, the instances are often created as Windows services, which allows for parallel start-up. UNIX-based deployments often use a shell script to restart the instances. Be careful to avoid unneeded dependencies.
If the script starts the members in sequence (that is, if it starts a member only after the preceding instance has started successfully), GemFire waits and delays start-up. Eventually, nodes do start up. However, they might use an incorrect state of the cache.