Manage number of cores and service instances to prevent exceeding GEMFIRE license limits

Products

• VMware Tanzu Gemfire
• VMware Tanzu Greenplum / Gemfire

Issue/Introduction

Gemfire core usage was significantly over licensed limit. To stop further growth, you plan to prevent creating new Gemfire service instances and cores. You have to implement this without causing any disruption to production applications.

Environment

Applicable to all supported versions of Tanzu GemFire on the Tanzu Platform.

Resolution

We recommend a two-pronged approach: managing platform-level access and locking existing cluster configurations.

1.  Restrict New Instance Creation via Quotas: Set a limit on the number of service instances allowed in your Organizations. Run the following command for each Org, replacing NUMBER with the count of instances currently deployed: cf update-org-quota QUOTA-NAME --service-instances NUMBER
2.  Disable Global Service Access: You can hide the GemFire service from the marketplace to prevent new users from discovering or creating it: cf disable-service-access p-cloudcache
Note: You can selectively re-enable access for specific Orgs that still require the ability to see existing instances.
3.  Lock Existing Cluster Sizes: To prevent existing clusters from scaling and consuming more cores, update each service instance to lock the server count: cf update-service INSTANCE_NAME -c '{"num_servers": CURRENT_COUNT}'

Test these commands in a non-production environment first to ensure they align with your operational workflows.

Guidance on verifying and updating service instance limits:
Service Instance creation may fail when a space has a quota for NUMBER-OF-SERVICE-INSTANCES