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 ActiveADAPTER?

ActiveADAPTER is a set of BizTalk adapters for working with Active Directory from BizTalk Server. We offer you:

  • A BizTalk Send Adapter that you can use to:
    • Create, move and delete Active Directory objects
    • Change object properties such as email addresses, office locations, home folder locations...
    • Set user passwords and add objects to security groups
  • A BizTalk Receive Adapter that you can use to query Active Directory and receive the results in an XML message into BizTalk Server
  • The input and output schemas for all ActiveADAPTER operations
  • Sample orchestrations and example XML input
  • Complete documentation

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What transactional strategy does the ActiveADAPTER Send Adapter use?

The Send Adapter commits changes per message and per object. This means commits cannot span messages. Within a message, changes to an object are all committed together. To ensure changes are all or nothing, therefore, the strategy you need to use is one message per object.

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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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