There's intentionally no "global parameter server" in ROS 2 as all parameters are now "owned" by individual nodes.
It would be possible to create a node called the "global parameter server" which allows anyone to set parameters on it and read parameters from it. We've discussed implementing this and even providing API's in rclcpp and rclpy to make is easy to use it, but we've not had time to do that.
Specifically for the urdf and rviz2, we changed to using a topic to communicate the robot description, though there's an open pr to have an option to use a parameter and you tell rviz on which node the parameter exists (e.g. the robot_state_publisher
), see:
https://github.com/ros2/robot_state_p...
And:
https://github.com/ros2/rviz/pull/362