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Microsoft Application Center 2000 allows Web site administrators to:
| • | Group Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server computers into clusters. |
| • | Easily manage Web site content and applications. |
| • | Maintain high levels of availability. |
Clustering increases the amount of traffic that the Web site can handle and guarantees availability when a server becomes disabled. In addition, with Application Center administrators can manage content and configuration settings on a single server, reducing the amount of time that network administrators require for updating their Web sites.
Application Center 2000 divides Web site content and code into "applications" that can be updated independently. These applications can consist of any combination of HTML and ASP files, COM+ components, Windows registry settings, and Internet Information Services (IIS) settings. Each server in the cluster hosts a copy of the application, which Application Center keeps synchronized. Within Application Center, a cluster's functionality could be divided into dozens of applications.
Application Center applications allow developers and administrators to work together more easily. By packaging the numerous and varied elements of a Web site into self-contained applications, administrators can now allow developers to modify IIS and registry settings, which will improve the efficiency of the developers.
Application Center 2000 uses Network Load Balancing (NLB) and Component Load Balancing (CLB) technologies to create clusters of Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server computers. No additional hardware is required, and the physical configuration of the member servers can be completely different. Application Center can create clusters from computers made by different manufacturers, with different numbers of processors, amounts of RAM, and sizes of hard disks.
Web browsers, like Microsoft Internet Explorer, see the cluster as a very large and very reliable Web server. Application Center can be set to improve cluster performance further by dividing client requests evenly across all members of the cluster. It can also maintain "session state" by responding to a client's requests with the same member of the cluster. Read the Component Load Balancing Overview for more information.
Once Application Center 2000 has been deployed to the cluster, administrators use Application Center 2000 in day-to-day operations to move Web site content from the staging server to the cluster. For Web site content such as HTML and ASP pages, Application Center automatically synchronizes all the servers in the cluster whenever an administrator deploys new content.
Deploying applications that consist of COM+ applications and ISAPI filters requires a special strategy. COM+ applications and ISAPI filters require servers to be restarted when they are upgraded. However, if all servers in the cluster were restarted at the same time, the Web site would go down. To avoid this, Application Center makes it easy to perform a "rolling upgrade" by creating a script with the Application Center command-line interface. The script upgrades a server, restarts it, and waits until it returns online before upgrading the next server in the cluster.
Microsoft Application Center 2000 is deployed on each server in a cluster. In a typical development environment, Application Center is also deployed to a staging server that is not a member of the cluster. This staging server acts as the drop-off point for Web content and application developers. With Application Center, you can move content and configuration settings from the staging server to the cluster with an easy point-and-click interface.
Application Center has the ability to deploy content to foreign clusters, which allows network administrators to easily move content and applications from a staging server to a production cluster that consists of multiple servers. The staging server does not need to be a member of the production cluster.
Discount purchase programs are available through Open, Select, and Enterprise agreements. Application Center is licensed on a per-processor basis and is installed on each Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server computer in a cluster, and often on staging and development servers as well.
Note: Prices listed are Estimated Retail Prices.
In the example above, four licenses must be obtained to run Application Center on a single quad-processor server. The Application Center client tools, which are used to administrate Application Center clusters, can be installed on as many Windows 2000 computers as needed. Visit the Application Center Pricing and Licensing page for more information.
