Chapter 8 -- Creating Clusters and Deploying Applications

Chapter 8

This chapter provides information about the preferred approaches to creating single and multi-tier clusters, creating a stager, and using a stager to deploy applications to both the Web and component tiers.

In This Chapter

Setting Up and Testing a Two-Tier Cluster Environment

Setting Up a Stager

Sample Applications for Staging

Deployment Issues

Using a Stager to Deploy Applications

Deploy a New Application to a Web Cluster

Deploy an Application Update to a Web Cluster

Deploy a New Application with COM+ Components to Two Tiers

Resources

The first goal of this chapter is to set up a cluster and staging environment that's similar to the one illustrated in Figure 8.1. The other goal is to show you how to deploy different types of applications to one or both server tiers by using the staging server (stager).

In the architecture shown in Figure 8.1, we have a front-end Web cluster with three servers that can be accessed by both internal and external Web clients. These clients can access only the Web cluster, but the stager can access both clusters to deploy applications. The back-end cluster consists of two component servers that support Component Load Balancing (CLB) by responding to component requests that are routed from the Web cluster.

Figure 8.1 A two-tier cluster and stager environment

Table 8.1 describes the configuration of each computer that we used in our test clusters. Their capacity should be taken into account when viewing the load testing results that are provided later in this chapter.

Table 8.1 Computer Configurations Used in the Test Clusters

Name and role	Cluster type	CPU	Memory	Drive capacity
ACDW516AS, controller	Web	1xP6-550	256	2.9 GB
ACDW802AS, member	Web	1xP6-366	256	2.5 GB
ACDW518AS, member	Web	1xP6-550	256	3.0 GB
ACDW522AS, controller	COM+	1xP6-366	256	2.2 GB
ACDW811AS, member	COM+	1xP6-233	256	4.0 GB
ACDW822AS, stager	Web	1xP6-266	128	2.5 GB