Summary

Once an application has been tested, debugged, and tuned, it must be deployed to its final destination. As a rule, system administrators are responsible for deploying the application. Since MTS application packages are usually location transparent, the system administrator has a great deal of flexibility in deciding how to deploy the application.

An application distribution topology is determined based on existing computing infrastructure and corporate policy, results of performance tuning, and any implementation-specific constraints. The topology must consider the placement of system servers such as SQL Server, MSMQ, and IIS in addition to the placement of your application packages. Topologies can range from a single server node to complex configurations of multiple servers. If you have high reliability or availability requirements, you might need to install the application on one or more clusters. As you add server machines to the topology, administration of the application becomes more difficult but you are able to support greater user load. There are trade-offs between the scalability achieved by distributing the application over more machines, the network traffic generated by cross-machine calls, cross-machine security considerations, and administrative complexity. It is important to find a balance that satisfies your application's performance requirements and provides room for future growth without being overly complex.

During deployment, the system administrator will install packages on server machines, export client install programs to be installed on individual client machines, and finalize the package settings. While activation properties, transaction properties, and some security settings can be set during development, the final security settings probably won't be known until deployment time. In particular, system administrators are usually responsible for populating roles with user accounts. Once the application packages have been installed, they should be locked to prevent accidental changes to their settings.