The membership management for groups is typically manual or static in nature. Manually managing memberships works well for small deployments but not necessarily in large, dynamic environments where new targets come into the system frequently. Groups whose members are added frequently would be easier to maintain if they were to be defined by membership criteria instead of adding targets directly into the group. When the membership criteria is defined once, Enterprise Manager will automatically add targets.

A dynamic group is a group whose membership is determined by membership criteria. The owner of a dynamic group specifies the membership criteria during dynamic group creation (or modification) and membership in the group is determined solely by the criteria specified. Membership in a dynamic group cannot be modified directly because targets cannot be directly added to a dynamic group. Enterprise Manager automatically adds targets that match membership criteria when a dynamic group is created. It also updates group membership as new targets are added or target properties are changed and the target matches the group's membership criteria.

It is important to note that static groups can contain dynamic groups as members but not the other way around. You cannot include a static group as a member of a dynamic group.

Use the Define Membership Criteria function of Dynamic Groups to define the criteria for group membership. Once you have defined criteria, the targets selected by the criteria will be displayed in a read-only table in the Members region of the Groups page. Since dynamic groups are defined by criteria, you can intentionally or unintentionally define criteria that could result in very large groups.

The following requirements apply to dynamic groups:

• Dynamic groups cannot contain static groups, other dynamic groups, or administration groups.

• Administration groups cannot contain dynamic groups, however, a static group can contain dynamic groups as a member.

• OR-based criteria is not supported. All criteria selected on the criteria page are AND-based.

• Supported properties are global properties, user-defined properties, and other attributes specifically supported for groups such as Version, Platform, Target Name, and Type. Other instance properties and config data elements are not supported as membership criteria.

• The View Any Target and Add Any Target privileges are required to create a dynamic group.

• The Full Any Target, Add Any Target, and Create Privilege Propagating Group privileges are required to create a privilege-propagating dynamic group.