Administering stand-alone servers, arrays, and the enterprise
You install Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server as a stand-alone server or as an array member. In both cases, ISA Management shows the server as belonging to an array.
When you install an array member, you specify the array to which it belongs.
For stand-alone servers, as part of the installation process, an array with the same name as the ISA Server computer is created.
For more information, see The enterprise, arrays, and stand-alone servers.
Array policy for stand-alone servers
Stand-alone servers have an array policy. Depending on installation mode, the array policy consists of:
| • | Policy elements. Includes schedules, bandwidth priorities, destination sets, client address sets, protocol definitions, content groups, and dial-up entries. For more information, see Policy elements. |
| • | Access policy rules. Includes site and content rules, protocol rules, and Internet Protocol (IP) packet filters. For more information, see Configuring access policy. |
| • | Publishing rules. Includes server publishing and Web publishing rules. For more information, see Configuring publishing. |
| • | Cache configuration. Includes cache size, expiration policy. For more information, see Configuring ISA Server cache. |
| • | Routing rules. Determine whether a Web Proxy client request is retrieved directly from the specified destination or redirected to an upstream server. For more information, see Routing Web requests. |
| • | Bandwidth rules. Set priorities for any request passing through ISA Server. For more information, see Configuring bandwidth rules. |
| • | Local address table and local domain table configuration. These tables include the IP addresses or names of all internal computers. For more information, see Configuring the local address table and Configuring the local domain table. |
Array and enterprise policies for array members
If you install ISA Server as an array member, enterprise policy settings determine whether an array policy can be created and which types of rules can be included in the array policy. See Applying enterprise policy for more information.
The enterprise administrator is responsible not only for creating and configuring enterprise policy, but also for determining how and if that policy should be applied to all the arrays in the enterprise.
The enterprise policy includes site and content rules and protocol rules. The enterprise policy can be applied to any array and can be augmented by the array's own policy. This enables administrators at branch and departmental levels to adopt governing enterprise policies.
More than one enterprise policy can be created. Each enterprise policy can be applied to one or more arrays. You can configure permissions for the enterprise policies, limiting which administrators can configure the rules. For more information, see Configuring permissions.
You can also create policy elements at the enterprise level. These policy elements can be used by enterprise-level rules or by array-level rules.
If the array uses only an array policy (no enterprise policy), then you cannot modify the array's policy settings to use an enterprise policy. Likewise, if the array uses an enterprise policy, you cannot change the array's policy settings to use only an array policy (set to Array policy only.
For configuration instructions, see Create an enterprise policy.
Managing remote arrays
You can use ISA Server to manage more than one stand-alone server at a time. Each stand-alone server belongs to its own array. Each has its own array policy, which you can configure by creating rules and modifying properties. For more information, see Using remote administration.
For array members, all the arrays in the enterprise are displayed in ISA Management. You can only configure the arrays in the enterprise only if you have the appropriate permissions. For more information, see Configuring permissions.