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Managing Hosts with Specific Back Ends

For manual load balancing, hosts can be assigned under the management of specific Key Manager back ends. As a practical example regarding large, global Key Manager deployments, this functionality can be used to force hosts to be managed by the local back-end groups.

Hosts are assigned under specific back ends using back-end tags. When a host is given one or more back- end tags, the host can only be managed by back ends that have the same tag.

In order to assign a host under a Key Manager back end, you will need to tag both the Key Manager back end and the host:

  • To set back.end tags to a Key Manager back end, navigate to the Settingsā†’Management Servers page, and perform a Tag action on the target back end.

  • To set back-end tags to a host, navigate to the Hosts page, and perform a Backend Tag action (not a Tag action) on the target host.

note

The exact behavior of introduced by back-end tags differs depending on the type of the management connection:

  • Agentless hosts that have a non-zero number of back-end tags will only be managed by those Key Manager back ends tagged with one or more similar tags. The back end that is to perform a management job is chosen from the applicable back ends, based on the current load on each back end.

  • Agent-based hosts that have a non-zero number of back-end tags prefer to connect to Key Manager back ends that are tagged with one or more of those back-end tag(s). If the host is unable to connect to any preferred back end, it will try to connect to all other back ends.

    The order in which a agent-based host tries to connect to back ends is the same in which they are written in its agent-configuration file (agent-conf.json). After each connection where jobs are run, or where the agent settings are modified, the connection order is rewritten so that first the preferred back ends are written in a random order, then the other back ends are appended in a random order.