Application Servers

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Once you have established your network, web server, and file server architecture, it is time to examine the application servers you need for the enterprise. These servers are responsible for the middle tiers of your applications, such as BizTalk orchestration and SharePoint indexing and search. Your architectural choices are no less critical here than the choices you have already made for your server room.

Microsoft Content Management Server 2002

Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 has been tested to serve over 100 million dynamic pages per day. By adding processors to a computer, Content Management Server 2002 scales up to continue to provide superior performance with high web site traffic demands. By adding additional computers running Content Management Server 2002 into a load balanced environment, Content Management Server 2002 scales out to meet the highest traffic demands and provide failover support, ensuring maximum uptime. Go to www.microsoft.com/cmserver/default.aspx?url=/cmserver/evaluation/overview/ for additional details on CMS scalability.

You can integrate Content Management Server 2002 with Microsoft Application Center, making it easier to deploy additional web servers. This integration also provides an open deployment API for building customized deployment scenarios. For instance, Application Center enables customers to schedule automatic or incremental deployments, and it helps with registration of server control components .

Commerce Server 2002

A Commerce Server site consists of two main elements that must achieve acceptable performance. First are the web pages, including the product catalog, which are likely to receive a great deal of user traffic. The second and related element is the SQL Server database that stores the catalog, accepts the transactions, and maintains some or all of the user profile information.

SQL Server 2000 has been designed for high scalability and stability. It supports the highly dynamic data typical for an e-commerce site, with read/write balances approaching 50/50 with no significant performance degradation. Commerce Server stores have been successfully tested for up to 10 million users in the store. To optimize a Commerce Server site, you must follow all the best practices relating to SQL Server configuration and management. There are many sources for this information, including the online help file and TechNet. A good place to begin is the Microsoft Reference Architecture for Commerce at msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnrac/html/mracv2_ch00.asp. You should also read a fictional case study called Duwamish VB 7.0 Beta 2 at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&familyid=32dbda05-b5de-45b9-a626-55fc20203cb4 or Duwamish 7 C# at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&familyid=132e17b9-d241-4400-b744-54134cbc1b88.

In addition to standard SQL Server configuration, you may need to scale the database out for best performance. You can subdivide the database function by allocating additional database servers for each Commerce Server database. For instance, you may want to move the Commerce Server data warehouse to its own server so its operation does not degrade transaction processing on your store. Similarly, you could segment profile information from the catalog by putting the catalog and user profiles on separate servers. The Commerce Server Manager lets you move databases after the site is deployed, or you can assign them as desired during the initial site configuration.

As discussed in Chapter 7, you can store user profiles in SQL Server, in Active Directory, or in a combination of the two. For an external commerce site, you are likely to use SQL Server profiles alone or store a minimum of account information in Active Directory, such as username and password, with the remaining attributes (address, payment information, site visits , and so on) in SQL Server.

Much of the performance optimization for Commerce Server depends on SQL Server. Many large commerce sites use clustering for the SQL database. For a detailed example, see "Commerce Server 2000 High Availability Reference Architecture: Compaq-Microsoft High Availability Reference Architecture Validation," available at go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=6687. Moving to a clustered environment will affect your Commerce Server installation. For information about installing Direct Mailer and Predictor on a cluster, see "Installing Commerce Server 2002 Resources as Clustered Resources" in your Commerce Server online help.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003

The architecture of the prior version of SharePoint Portal Server (version 1) was not suitable to scale beyond the needs of workgroups and medium- sized organizations. Microsoft has taken a new approach with SharePoint Portal Server 2003, moving the repository to a relational database and allowing components of the product, such as indexing and search, to be moved to separate servers. You can use a server farm for frontend web servers, which would have a large impact on performance for pages served .

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 lets you choose the storage engine. The default storage for a single-user installation uses the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (Windows) 2000 (WMSDE) for your databases. This is adequate for development or for operating in a small-scale environment. To support hundreds of sites, you may need the performance advantages of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) as your database backend.

Once you move to SQL Server as your database engine for SharePoint Portal Server or Windows SharePoint Services, you can follow the architectural guidance to scale SQL Server as high as you need to accommodate your requirements.

A large-scale SharePoint Server deployment might therefore consist of:

  • 3 “5 web servers as the frontend to the portal

  • 1 “2 search servers to serve up search results to users

  • 1 “2 index servers to crawl content and maintain indices

  • 1 large, clustered SQL Server installation for the repository

The model and configuration of the servers would be tailored to these roles. Relatively inexpensive commodity servers lend themselves to the web server, search, and index server roles.

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Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers
Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers
ISBN: 0321159632
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 164

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