Adding New Servers to a Farm

When adding new servers into your current GridLink farm, you should follow the same guidelines regarding permissions and user rights set up, AXIS library installation and AXIS installation as installing GridLink on a new farm. However, you don't need to change the farm settings in this case because they have been done previously and will be applied to new servers automatically.

Also, you don't need to suspend the farm when adding new servers.

1. Run GridLink Utility. In the "Log on" dialog, type the name of one of the servers with GridLink licence in the Profile Host Name edit box. Enter the correct password and click on "OK".

The utility should list all existing servers in the current farm.

2. Select menu "Farm Profile - Add server to farm", type a new server name in "Server name" editor, click "OK".

3. Repeat step 2 to add all new servers.

4. Now you can remotely install GridLink service on the new servers from a central location. Please note that you need to have the administrator's right on all new servers.

Right-click on each new server, select "Service - Install" from the right-click menu and :

• When the utility asks you if you want to unblock the controller from Windows Firewall, answer "Yes".
• specify the installation path, and a user account under which the service will be run.

5. If the Operating System of the new servers is Windows Server 2008/HPC Server 2008, please note that there is a known issue with Server Message Block (SMB) Version 2, which may cause AXIS Distributed Processing to fail. The problem can be avoided by changing some registry settings. To do so, right-click on each of the new servers, select the menu "Tools - Server Message Block 2.0 Settings - Set SMB2 Settings in Registry" and then set the cache life time to 0.  (GridLink 4.30 or later version required.)

Please refer to our online KB article "Resolve SMB2 Problems in AXIS Distributed Processing" for more information.