Planning a Message Queuing Network

Before developing (or purchasing) queuing applications, you should review the factors that influence how well Message Queuing will work in your environment. Table 27-5 describes the essential points.

Table 27-5. Factors in planning a Message Queuing network

Site Factor	Consideration
Communication channel	The channel between sites must be permanent.
Bandwidth	The available bandwidth must be sufficient to support the message traffic.
Performance	The number of Message Queuing servers must be balanced against performance needs. The more servers, the more traffic. If there is too much server redundancy, the Active Directory replication traffic will cause a big performance hit.
Organization	Users should be grouped in the same site to keep traffic down.

Hardware Issues Involved in Message Queuing

Assuming that you don't have the luxury of building a queuing operation with all new hardware, you can do several things to make sure that the machines assigned to be Message Queuing servers can handle the load:

• Increase the amount of system RAM. (Whatever it is, it's never too much.)
• Upgrade the processor or add additional processors.
• Increase the speed and size of the hard disks.
• Use disk striping or separate disks. Excellent performance can be had using five separate disks used for message files, message log files, transaction log files, application data files, and Windows 2000 virtual memory paging files. At a minimum, the message files, message log files, and transaction log files should be on separate disks.
• Reduce or eliminate the other services running on the server.
• Minimize the number of dependent clients supported by each server. (Dependent clients require continuous connection to a Message Queuing server to perform message queuing operations.)

More Info

For the nuts and bolts of building applications with Microsoft Message Queuing, consult Programming Distributed Applications with COM and Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 by Ted Pattison (Microsoft Press, 2000).