Chapter 6 - Microsoft Application Center 2000

About This Chapter

Microsoft Application Center is a strategic server product in Microsoft’s .NET Enterprise Servers tier. Application Center was developed to provide a competitively priced, yet robust tool for scaling and managing a broad range of Web-based business applications. Its feature set, which includes load-balancing and server synchronization, can support COM+ applications. Application Center is integrated with core Microsoft Windows 2000 Server services, such as Network Load Balancing (NLB), and because of its level of integration, it extends the core operating system services by providing tools such as application publishing. It’s positioned in the .NET Enterprise Servers tier so that it’s able to integrate fully with other middle-tier servers and services, as well as the development tools layer. In this chapter you’ll learn about the functionality supported by Application Center and learn what factors you must consider when planning an Application Center cluster. Lesson 3 deals specifically with Component Load Balancing (CLB), an Application Center feature that provides dynamic load balancing for COM+ applications.

Before You Begin

To complete the lessons in this chapter, you must have

• Experience administering Windows 2000 Server and designing Windows 2000 networks
• The ability to implement the NLB service in a Windows 2000 Web environment
• The ability to implement NLB and CLB in Application Center 2000