Plan your rollout with this overview of product implementation
Microsoft Mobile Information 2001 Server, a powerful platform for delivering enterprise wireless applications, will become commercially available in mid-2001. Already, many Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are developing applications and solutions for the new platform. If your management decides the product is a good choice for your enterprise, you'll need to know something about planning for Mobile Information Server deployment and security. The product documentation will provide the click-by-click details about installation and configuration, but you'll be better prepared for the job if you become familiar with the big picture beforehand. You'll also need to know what's involved in configuring Mobile Information Server's built-in applications (i.e., Microsoft Outlook Mobile Access and Intranet Browse) and setting up enterprise users for wireless mobility.
Preparing for Installation
You'll need an implementation plan to identify the resources required for Mobile Information Server and the steps involved in deploying it. Your implementation plan should document hardware and software requirements, the location of Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server or Exchange Server 5.5, the security model your enterprise will use, and the number of wireless users you'll support. Other considerations include the effects of changes the product requires you to make to the Active Directory (AD) schema, the number of servers required, and whether you'll use load balancing.
For a basic enterprise implementation, the only hardware you need is a server on which to run Mobile Information Server. The minimum hardware requirements are a 200MHz Pentium II processor, 128MB of RAM, and 50MB of hard disk space. However, for a good production environment, you'll need to beef up this configuration. I've used a Compaq ProLiant server with a 733MHz Pentium III processor, 1GB of RAM, and two 18GB RAID 1 SCSI hard disks. The system must run Windows 2000 Server or Win2K Advanced Server, and the latest service pack (currently Service Pack 1—SP1) and Microsoft Message Queue Services (MSMQ) must be installed. You'll also need two IP addresses: one for browse traffic and the other for notification traffic. Because Mobile Information Server uses proxy-type functionality to let wireless users access enterprise data sources, optimize the system the software runs on to handle concurrent connections.
Before you can install Mobile Information Server, AD and Exchange Server (either Exchange 2000 or Exchange Server 5.5) must be installed in the enterprise. Exchange Server must reside on a system different from the Mobile Information Server installation. Companies that haven't yet migrated to Win2K, AD, or Exchange 2000 can set up a separate Win2K environment and AD forest to let users access Exchange Server 5.5 through Mobile Information Server.
Microsoft recommends implementing Mobile Information Server in the corporate demilitarized zone (DMZ), primarily for security reasons but also because the Mobile Information Server system needs to have an Internet-accessible address. Most Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Internet-enabled wireless devices connect to Mobile Information Server over the Internet. You'll need to open certain ports in the internal and external firewalls, as I explain later.
Successful production deployment and system performance depend on the number of users and geographical regions your implementation will serve. Microsoft recommends using separate servers for each geographical area (e.g., one server for the enterprise's Denver office and another server for the Houston, Texas, office) and adding servers when the number of users in a particular region exceeds 4000. My experience is that Mobile Information Server Enterprise Edition should have LAN access to the Exchange Server system and other enterprise data sources that wireless users will use. Enterprise data that must travel over a WAN connection can result in high latency—and thus poor response times. One benefit of a corporate-hosted solution is that it lets you avoid WAN connections to data resources.
To support more than 4000 users in a particular region, you can use multiple machines to scale up Mobile Information Server. Various load-balancing techniques, such as round-robin DNS, let you support any number of enterprise wireless users without sacrificing performance. Although Mobile Information Server doesn't support Microsoft's clustering technologies, Microsoft might enable clustering in future versions.
Deploying Mobile Information Server
Deploying Mobile Information Server is a multistep process. You need to perform steps on the AD system as well as on the Mobile Information Server machine. Although Win2K, SP1, and MSMQ are required, I don't discuss setting up those pieces of the implementation.
Prepare the AD forest. First, you need to update the AD schema to support wireless users, mobility settings, and Mobile Information Server operation. You can't undo schema changes even if you uninstall Mobile Information Server. To ensure that the schema changes won't cause a problem in your environment, you can create an AD forest to test the schema changes before you actually deploy Mobile Information Server.
The ForestPrep switch in the Mobile Information Server setup routine adds AD classes and attributes to make the necessary schema changes. The user who runs ForestPrep must be a member of both the Schema Admins group and the Enterprise Admins group. You need to perform forest preparation in the domain that contains the AD schema, but not necessarily on the computer that contains the master schema.
To prepare the forest, insert the Mobile Information Server CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive. Click Start, Run, and type
"E:\\setup.exe" /vFORESTPREP=1
where E is the CD-ROM drive. Click OK, then click OK at the warning that Figure 1 shows to extend the AD schema. In the dialog box that appears, enter the fully qualified name of the domain in which you'll install Mobile Information Server.