Planning Topology and Communication

Create a topology plan and a detailed list of machines and communication ports that your members will use. Configure your Pivotal GemFire systems and configure the communication between the systems.

Your configuration governs how your applications find each other and distribute events and data among themselves.

Work with your system administrator to determine the protocols and addresses you will use for membership and communication. The communication details you determine in this step will be used in the system configuration steps that follow.
1. For each host machine with more than one network adapter card, decide whether to use the default address or one or more non-default bind addresses. You can use different cards for peer and server.
2. Identify any members you want to run as standalone, isolated members, with no member discovery. This is sometimes a good option for clients. It has faster startup, but no peer-to-peer distribution of any kind.
3. For all non-standalone members:
  - Decide whether you will use GemFire locators for member discovery. They are recommended for production systems and required for implementing security, network partitioning management, and client/server installations. Decide how many locators you will use and where they will run. To ensure the most stable startup and availability, use multiple locators run on multiple machines. Create a list of your locators' address and port pairs. You will use the list to configure your system members, any clients, and the locators themselves.
  - If you will use multicasting for communication or as an alternate to locators for peer member discovery, note the addresses and ports. Select both unique multicast ports and unique addresses for your distributed systems.
    Note: Use different port numbers for different systems, even if you use different multicast addresses. Some operating systems do not keep communication separate between systems that have unique addresses but the same port number.
Set up membership in your systems. See Configuring Peer-to-Peer Discovery.
Set up communication between system members. See Configuring Peer Communication.
As needed, set up communication between your systems. See Configuring a Client/Server System.

When you run your systems, your members will find each other and communicate using the configured methods and addresses.