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 is an example of how and why I might use 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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Is there a version of ActiveADAPTER for BizTalk 2006?

An older version of ActiveADAPTER is available for BizTalk Server 2006, based on .NET 2.0. Please contact us if you are interested in evaluating this version.

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Can ActiveADAPTER help me retrieve information from Active Directory?

Yes. The Active Directory Receive Adapter can be used to create a Receive Location that queries Active Directory at regular intervals and submit the results to your BizTalk application. A message can be submitted to BizTalk at every polling interval, or only when a change occurs in the query results (this is the "On Change Only" option on the Active Directory Receive Adapter property configuration).

In addition, the Active Directory Send Adapter can be used with a Solicit-Response Send Port to perform an on-demand query. You just send your query parameters to the send port in a message that conforms to the supplied schema, and receive your results back in a new message.

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