Creating and modifying zones

You can use zones to specify a physical location of your appliance. This physical location might be two different areas of a power grid within the same data center, or appliances that are in completely different data centers, perhaps in different parts of the country.

Before you begin

Before you create and configure zones, you must install, configure, and assemble your appliances into a collective. You can then select the appliances in your collective to be in particular zones. If you add an additional appliance to the collective after zones have been created, you can specify the zone when you add the appliance.

About this task

By specifying zones to physically demarcate the location of your appliances, the data that is stored in your data grids can be placed in a proper location. The DataPower® XC10 Appliance uses zones to determine where to place primary and replica information for the cache. For example, if a primary data grid is in zone 1, then the replica for that data grid would be in zone 2. If you only have one zone, then no replicas are created.

When an appliance is first initialized, it is added to the default zone, which is called DefaultZone. When you add your appliances to zones that you create, they are removed from the DefaultZone zone. You cannot add appliances back to the DefaultZone zone after they have been removed.

Procedure

  1. In the user interface, click Collective > Zones.
  2. Add zones. Click Add Zones. Specify a name for the zone that you want to add. The zone name displays on the console page. You can repeat these steps if you are creating multiple zones.
  3. Add appliances to the zone. Expand the zone name and select appliances to add to the zone. Repeat these steps until all your appliances in the collective have been added to zones. Each appliance must be in a zone. A single zone cannot contain appliances from different collectives.
  4. Apply the zone changes. Your zone changes are not effective until after you click Activate Zone Changes. If you want to change your zone information, you can click the delete icon (delete icon) to remove a zone or click Reset Zone Changes to reset the zones to the last configuration that you activated.

Results

DataPower XC10 Appliance can create primary and replica data caches based on the physical locations, or zones, that you defined. You can view or change the topology of your zones at any time by clicking Collective > Zones in the user interface.

What to do next

Create and configure your applications and data grids.