5.6 Building a Commerce Server Site

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Theoretically, you can build a Commerce Server installation on a single machine, running all of the Commerce Server components, Windows 2000, and SQL Server together. In fact, this book is being written on just such a beast, but there is no way that this could be used in a production environment. The recommended configuration for a small site is a minimum of four servers-two of which are identical machines used to serve the Web pages and the other two of which are SQL Servers running in a server cluster. In this configuration we would also use network load balancing (NLB) to ensure higher availability and two firewalls for security.

Microsoft recommends two four-processor 500MHz servers with 2GB RAM for the SQL Servers in a small configuration. Large configurations are defined as those utilising between 10 and 100 servers, and in this scenario you would have multiple clusters of SQL Server databases. Commerce Server supports both SQL Server 7.0 (with SP2 or later) and 2000, so if you have not upgraded to 2000 yet, you can still use Commerce Server.

5.6.1 Clustering SQL Server and Commerce Server 2000

Active/active clustering enables you to have two SQL Servers up and running (on separate servers), both working on their own unique data sets (known as shared nothing ). In a Commerce Server environment you could structure the site so that the product catalog runs on one server and the data warehouse runs on the other-thereby getting day-to-day value from the second server investment. The possible downside is that, should a server fail, it will failover to the second server, imposing its workload onto a single server. Would your Web site still work if all of the database workload were running on one server? The other option is an active/passive installation that has a fully redundant second server that is only used on failure of the first server. The upside is that if the machines are the same specification, your postfailure transactional throughput should be the same as before the failure. This is a compromise decision that you need to take, depending on budget, but the splitting of data warehouse and product catalog/commerce features may be a logical structure.

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