Do You Have Any Tips About Load Balancing, Failover and Clustering for ActiveADAPTER?

Active Directory Send Adapter

If you create multiple host instances for the host that acts as the send handler for ActiveADAPTER, BizTalk will generally take care of failover for you with send ports.  BizTalk will distribute messages to the host instances in a round robin fashion, and if one is down it will try the next. See your BizTalk documentation for more information.

Active Directory Receive Adapter

The best way to think about ActiveADAPTER receive locations and failover is to treat them like FTP receive locations. Microsoft has a number of documents dealing with failover and clustering solutions for FTP receive locations and these architectures will typically apply to ActiveADAPTER receive locations. See your BizTalk documentation for more information.

The use of Host load balancing in NOT recommended for receive locations. The queries performed by your ActiveADAPTER receive locations do not lock Active Directory results and if run on different host instances as part of load balancing may result in duplicate messages into your receive ports.

Clustering

As mentioned above, the best way to think about ActiveADAPTER in terms of clustering architecture is like the FTP adapter. There are a couple of useful resources about adapters and clustering at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561801(v=bts.20).aspx

http://kentweare.blogspot.com/2009/04/clustering-biztalk-hosts.html

In the second article Kent Weare discusses Active/Passive clustering that can offer redundancy with just the one BizTalk host – “host clustering”.

FAQs
What Can I Do With ActiveADAPTER?

Here is an example of one of dozens of high ROI BizTalk applications you can build with ActiveADAPTER.

Suppose Jane is a new hire in your organization.

At the end of the hiring process, HR notify IT operations of Jane's start date. A member of IT Operations (with no Active Directory knowledge) goes to your Service Desk system, raises a new ticket, and completes a simple form about Jane's role in your organisation.

From the information entered, the Service Desk system creates an xml file and submits it to BizTalk. BizTalk uses the information in the message and ActiveADAPTER to:

  • create Jane's Active Directory account
  • synchronize Jane's Active Directory telephone numbers, office location, and Manager's name from the information in HR system entered during the recruitment process
  • set a first-use password for Jane and specify that it must be changed on first logon
  • grant Jane access to the resources she will need by placing her in a number of security groups

On Jane's first day BizTalk uses ActiveADAPTER to enable Jane's account and emails the first-use password to her Manager at 8am.

On arrival, Jane is given her first-use password and logs on with access to everything she needs.

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What will ActiveADAPTER add to what I see in BizTalk Server?

After installing ActiveADAPTER you will see a new transport type option when configuring a send port or receive location. With BizTalk send ports, you can create, delete, rename, move, and modify Active Directory objects. With BizTalk receive locations, you can draw XML messages into BizTalk containing Active Directory query results.

On your Programs menu you will also have an ActiveADAPTER program group containing shortcuts to documentation, sample orchestrations and schemas to get you developing your solutions quickly.

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Will the ActiveADAPTER Send Adapter return error information back to my orchestration?

Yes. The adapter will return any exceptions back to your application AFTER any retries you have configured have been done.

Within your orchestration you can use Scope shapes to catch exceptions. In your exception handlers you can retrieve the error description to determine which way to branch.

Sample orchestrations that illustrate exception handing are included in the ActiveADAPTER Samples folder.

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