#### 18.2.1.1 Deploying Instances for Group Replication

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 The first step is to deploy at least three instances of MySQL Server, this procedure demonstrates using multiple hosts for the instances, named s1, s2 and s3. It is assumed that MySQL Server was installed on each of the hosts, see [Chapter 2, *Installing and Upgrading MySQL*](installing.html). Group Replication is a built-in MySQL plugin provided with MySQL Server 8.0, therefore no additional installation is required. For more background information on MySQL plugins, see [Section 5.6, “MySQL Server Plugins”](server-plugins.html).

 In this example, three instances are used for the group, which is the minimum number of instances to create a group. Adding more instances increases the fault tolerance of the group. For example if the group consists of three members, in event of failure of one instance the group can continue. But in the event of another failure the group can no longer continue processing write transactions. By adding more instances, the number of servers which can fail while the group continues to process transactions also increases. The maximum number of instances which can be used in a group is nine. For more information see [Section 18.1.4.2, “Failure Detection”](group-replication-failure-detection.html).

