Patent ID: 7519600

Claim:
A system comprising: a plurality of server nodes communicatively coupled on a network of computer systems to serve applications over the network to a plurality of clients, the computer systems each having a processor and a memory and the plurality of server nodes organized as instances, each instance including at least one server process running in at least one of the computer system memories; a data object to store a hierarchical representation of configuration data associated with management of the server nodes, the data object accessible by all of the servers and the hierarchy having a first subset of nodes containing configuration data associated with all of the servers, a second subset of nodes containing configuration data specific to all servers of a first instance and a third subset of nodes containing configuration data specific to a first server of the first instance; a property sheet logically positioned at one of the nodes of the data object, the property sheet data structure including a plurality of property names, wherein each respective property name included in the property sheet data structure is associated with a default configuration value and, optionally, a custom configuration value to pair the default configuration value to the custom configuration value for updating a configuration parameter represented in the data object, wherein the property sheet data structure preserves both the default configuration value and the custom configuration value; and a configuration manager on at least one of the server nodes to update configuration data stored on the at least one server node based on the location of an updated configuration parameter within the hierarchy, wherein all servers are to be updated in response to an updated configuration parameter within the first subset of nodes, all servers of the first instance are to be updated in response to an updated configuration parameter within the second subset of nodes and only the first server is to be updated in response to an updated configuration parameter within the third subset of nodes.