Create the cluster. To create a cluster, right-click the Application Center snap-in in the left pane of the Application Center console and select Connect. Enter BIGSERVER1 (or the server's DNS name or IP address) as the server name and, in the resulting Connect to Server dialog box, use an administrative account to connect to the server. (You can use localhost as the server name if you're using the console on server BIGSERVER1 to create the cluster.) After you select the Create a new cluster option in the New Server dialog box, Application Center will start the New Cluster Wizard. You must provide a cluster name, such as WebCluster; select a cluster type, such as Web cluster, and select a load-balancing type, such as NLB or third-party load balancing. If you use NLB, be sure that you have bound two static IP addresses to the front-end network interface before you create the cluster—the second IP address is the virtual IP address of the Web site. Application Center then creates the cluster and adds BIGSERVER1 to the cluster as the cluster controller.
To add BIGSERVER2 to the cluster, right-click the Members node under WebCluster in the Application Center console and select the Add cluster member option from the All Tasks drop-down menu. The Add Cluster Member Wizard will then prompt you to provide the server name, administrator account, and cluster controller name. After you input this information, you've created a two-node Web cluster. The WebCluster node in the Application Center snap-in, which Figure 4 shows, displays this cluster in the left pane.
Prepare the cluster controller. After you create the cluster, you must configure the Web server, install the COM+ application on the cluster controller (BIGSERVER1 in the example), and add a new application for the cluster. To do so, you first create a subdirectory, such as OrderWeb, in the wwwroot directory of IIS in the file system. The default wwwroot directory is C:\Inetput\wwwroot. You store the online order Web pages and related files in the OrderWeb subdirectory. You can use the Internet Information Services snap-in in the Application Center console to create a virtual directory, such as OnlineOrder, and point the virtual directory to the subdirectory path in the file system.
Next, in the Component Services snap-in, you create a COM+ application (e.g., called Online Order) in the COM+ application folder of BIGSERVER1 and import into Online Order the necessary COM components that you have registered in BIGSERVER1. For each component in Online Order, you need to enable the Components support dynamic load balancing option on the Activation tab of the components properties window. This setting ensures that the component will support CLB.
Now you can add a new application through the Applications node of WebCluster in the Application Center snap-in. In our example, this new application contains all the resources for the online order Web site and the COM+ application. To create a new application for WebCluster, click the New button on the menu bar of the top right pane, which Figure 5 shows, and give the cluster a name, such as Online Order App. When you highlight this application in the right pane, you can define the resources that the application uses in the bottom right pane. In this example, the resources include Online Order App as the COM+ application, C:\Inetput\wwwroot\OrderWeb as the file-system directory path, and Default Web Site/Root/OrderWeb as the IIS virtual directory.
Synchronize the application. By default, Application Center automatically replicates from the cluster controller to the cluster members all of an application's resources, such as the IIS virtual directory and contents, except the COM+ application. To perform this replication, Application Center uses two types of automatic synchronization: incremental and full. The incremental synchronization copies changes from the cluster controller to members only when a change occurs. The full synchronization replicates all of an application's contents and configuration settings from the cluster controller to members periodically at an interval that you define (the default is 60 minutes). You can enable or disable the automatic synchronization and set the full synchronization period in the properties of the cluster controller node in the Application Center snap-in. In this snap-in, you can also enable or disable a specific cluster member so that Application Center doesn't synchronize that member with the cluster controller.
In addition to automatic synchronization, Application Center lets you manually push an application's contents and configuration settings from the cluster controller to members. To do so, you simply right-click the cluster controller node in the Application Center snap-in and select the Synchronize Cluster option. You can also manually pull content and configuration settings from the cluster controller to a specific member by right-clicking the cluster member node in the Application Center snap-in and selecting the Synchronize Member option. However, you can't manually synchronize COM+ applications.
Deploy the application. After testing the COM+ application on the cluster controller, you can deploy the application to cluster members. When you deploy the COM+ application to a target server, the Web service on the server must be shut down. For this reason, Microsoft suggests that you deploy the COM+ application to one server at a time.
To deploy Online Order App from BIGSERVER1 to BIGSERVER2, right-click the Applications node under WebCluster in the Application Center snap-in. The New Deployment Wizard will guide you through the deployment steps. First, you must name the deployment. By default, the wizard uses the current date and time to name the deployment. Next, select BIGSERVER2 from the list of available target servers in the cluster, select Online Order App from the list of available applications, and specify COM+ application as the deployment option. Application Center will replicate the necessary components from BIGSERVER1 to BIGSERVER2. You can check a deployment's status in the Application Center console. A check mark next to the deployment in the right pane of the console means that the deployment completed successfully.
Application Center's deployment functionality lets you simultaneously deploy multiple applications and copy an entire server image from the cluster controller to one or more members. Application Center can even deploy applications from a server that isn't in the cluster to the current cluster. This feature lets you maintain a staging server outside the production cluster for application development and testing before you deploy an application to the cluster.
After Application Center successfully deploys an application, you must enable the servers that are supporting the COM+ application so that they can participate in CLB in the cluster. To enable the servers, go to the Component Services tab of the cluster's properties and add the servers to the list of Component servers. After you bring the servers back online, WebCluster is ready to accept client requests and perform load balancing for the Web servers and the COM+ application.
Cluster Monitoring
When your Application Center cluster is working, one of your ongoing maintenance tasks is to monitor the cluster's health and performance. Application Center's monitoring features make this task easy. You can use Application Center to track a cluster's health, performance, and availability and you can view the results in the console.
Application Center provides a performance monitor that includes 20 useful counters that let you monitor processors, memory, file systems, IIS, HTTP requests, and COM+ applications. To use Application Center's performance monitor, click a server or cluster in the Application Center snap-in. (If you click a cluster, the performance monitor serves as the cluster controller.) In the right pane, you can add necessary counters depending on what you want to monitor. For example, to see how busy the server CPU is, add the Processor Utilization counter. As Figure 4 illustrates, BIGSERVER1's CPU utilization averaged 45 percent in a 15-minute period.
Application Center includes Health Monitor 2.1, which is a more recent version of this monitoring tool than BackOffice 2000 and Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0 include. Microsoft preconfigured Application Center's Health Monitor to watch application synchronization, request forwarding, the IIS Web service, processor workload, and home page availability on a server. Figure 6, page 66, shows the Health Monitor node expanded. When you select a monitored item in the Health Monitor snap-in, you can view alerts and statistics regarding that item in the top right pane. You can add new monitors to Health Monitor based on your needs, and you can configure this tool to take the server offline and online and to send email alert messages to you when specified events occur. Application Center also provides an event viewer that lets you view events that Application Center and Health Monitor log.
Each Application Center server stores its health and performance data in a local Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) database, which is a SQL Server 2000 Runtime database. This setup means that you can use all of SQL Server's tools to retrieve and archive data from each server and generate custom reports about a cluster's health and performance.
Application Center also supports Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which is Microsoft's implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), an industry standard for accessing management information in an enterprise environment. WMI is a central place in which applications store and retrieve events and management data in Win2K. Application Center provides its generated events to WMI, so a third-party management tool that supports WMI can obtain and use Application Center events.
Simplify Your Life
In mid-2000, Microsoft introduced Microsoft .NET, a computing and communications concept that lets organizations create distributed Web services and integrate customers, partners, business processes, and applications on the Internet. Application Center is one of the Microsoft .NET products for Web site management. Application Center lets you implement high-availability and high-performance Web sites and automate load balancing, synchronization, and deployment of Web content and applications. Application Center's alerting and monitoring functions let you measure your Web site and applications' performance and troubleshoot to prevent failure on your site. Application Center will simplify Web management and make your life easier.