An installation on multiple machines consists of a master gateway node, which hosts the domain, and additional gateway nodes and worker nodes that run Informatica application services. The node type determines whether the node can serve as a gateway or a worker node and determines the domain functions that the node performs. You define the node type when you install Informatica services and join the node to the domain. You can use the Administrator tool to change the node type after installation.

By default, each node in the domain can run application services and computational processes. The node role determines whether a node can run application services, computational processes, or both. If the node has the service role, you can view the application service processes running on the node. Before you remove or shut down a node, verify that all running processes are stopped. You might need to shut down the node if you need to perform maintenance on the machine or to ensure that domain configuration changes take effect.

Use the Manage tab of the Administrator tool to manage nodes, including configuring node properties, updating a node role, and removing nodes from a domain. The properties that you can configure depend on the node role.

If your license includes grid, you can configure the Data Integration Service or the PowerCenter Integration Service to run on a grid. A grid is an alias assigned to a group of nodes. When you run jobs on a grid of nodes, you improve scalability and performance by distributing jobs to processes running on multiple nodes in the grid. When the PowerCenter Integration Service runs on a grid, you can configure it to check the resources available on each node. Assign connection resources and define custom and file/directory resources on a node that is assigned to a PowerCenter Integration Service grid.