IceGrid

IceGrid is a location and activation service for Ice applications. Clients reach the servers of an IceGrid deployment without knowing the host and port of each server, and IceGrid starts, stops and monitors these servers on the computers where they run. IceGrid provides the following features:

• Location service As an implementation of an Ice location service, IceGrid enables clients to bind indirectly to their servers, making applications more flexible and resilient to changing requirements. (IceDiscovery is an alternate, lightweight location service implementation for applications that don't require IceGrid's additional features.)
• On-demand server activation Starting an Ice server process is called server activation. IceGrid can be given responsibility for activating a server on demand, that is, when a client attempts to access an object hosted by the server. Activation usually occurs as a side effect of indirect binding, and is completely transparent to the client.
• Replication and load balancing IceGrid supports replication by grouping the object adapters of several servers into a single virtual object adapter. During indirect binding, a client can be bound to an endpoint of any of these adapters. Furthermore, IceGrid monitors the load on each computer and can use that information to decide which of the endpoints to return to a client.
• Sessions and resource allocation An IceGrid client establishes a session in order to allocate a resource such as an object or a server. IceGrid prevents other clients from allocating the resource until the client releases it or its session ends.
• Automatic failover The proxy of an object in a replica group resolves to the endpoints of all the replicas. When the Ice runtime in the client cannot connect to one replica, it connects to another.
• Dynamic queries In addition to transparent binding, applications can interact directly with IceGrid to locate objects in a variety of ways.
• Status monitoring IceGrid supports Slice interfaces that allow applications to monitor its activities and receive notifications about significant events, enabling the development of custom tools or the integration of IceGrid status events into an existing management framework.
• Administration IceGrid includes command-line and graphical administration tools. They are available on all supported platforms and allow you to start, stop, monitor, and reconfigure any server managed by IceGrid.
• Deployment Using XML files, you can describe the servers to be deployed on each computer. Templates simplify the description of identical servers.