Mobile Information Server Performance, Reliability, and Scalability

White Paper

For the latest information, please see https://www.microsoft.com/miserver/

On This Page

Introduction
Customer Benefits of Performance, Scalability, and Reliability
Performance Features in Microsoft Mobile Information Server
Scalability Features in Microsoft Mobile Information Server
Enterprise Scalability
Carrier Scalability
Cascaded Enterprise and Carrier Scalability
Distributed Push
Distributed Browse
Reliability Features in Microsoft Mobile Information Server
Performance Monitoring Tools
Conclusion

Introduction

Wireless data access services are on the verge of becoming critical business tools. Microsoft is committed to helping companies and service providers deliver reliable, efficient wireless access to information with Microsoft® Mobile Information Server (MMIS). Microsoft Mobile Information Server is a mobile application server that provides end-to-end delivery of a broad class of network services to mobile devices over existing and future wireless data infrastructures. In its first version, Microsoft Mobile Information Server will enable users to securely browse into their Exchange email, calendars, tasks and address books using a WAP 1.1 based mobile device, as well as to receive notifications from Because it is based on Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server and Exchange 2000 Server technologies, Microsoft Mobile Information Server delivers high levels of performance, security, and reliability, and it scales from the small business to large enterprises.

There are two versions of Microsoft Mobile Information Server: Microsoft Mobile Information 2001 Server—Enterprise Edition (MMIS-EE) and Microsoft Mobile Information 2001 Server—Carrier Edition (MMIS-CE). Microsoft Mobile Information Server—Enterprise Edition runs as part of a corporate network and makes data available in real time to mobile users. Microsoft Mobile Information Server—Carrier Edition runs in a wireless operator's data center and works in concert with a corporate Microsoft Mobile Information Server to deliver data securely to the corporation's mobile users. For more information about the Microsoft Mobile Information Server features and architecture, please read the overview White Paper at https://www.microsoft.com/miserver.

Microsoft is uniquely positioned to deliver a high-performance, scalable, and reliable solution because of its industry-leading resources in research and development; strong relationships with wireless carriers that can help shape and test products; and proven, established platform technologies such as Windows and Exchange.

Customer Benefits of Performance, Scalability, and Reliability

Performance

As with a traditional wired network, performance is an important attribute of a wireless data system. A high-performance system gives companies, application service providers (ASPs), and wireless service providers a basis to achieve the following goals:

• Consolidate servers, which results in lower cost of ownership.

• Carry increased messaging load.

• Low total cost of ownership, including cost effective scalability.

• Handle peak traffic reliably and efficiently.

• Provide an infrastructure for developing other high-performance applications.

• Deliver high availability, and therefore, better customer service and reduce lost revenue. High performance will enable ASPs and wireless service providers to meet service level agreements more easily and cost-effectively.

Scalability

The wireless data industry will experience exponential growth as more people receive and access more information over wireless channels. Many wireless carriers will require that a wireless data platform be able to support a mobile-enabled user base in excess of 1 million customers. Microsoft recognizes that wireless data access will be an important information technology objective for small companies and worldwide enterprises alike, which is why the ability to scale both up and down is a key feature of Microsoft Mobile Information Server.

Reliability

As wireless access to information becomes more widely available, the ability to access information from any location will become an integral part of how companies conduct business. For example, a mobile sales representative en route to an important meeting will come to rely on the ability to check on that customer's status using an Internet-enabled phone. And as these wireless applications become mission-critical business tools, reliability will become increasingly important.

Performance Features in Microsoft Mobile Information Server

Mobile Information Server derives its performance from its own architecture as well as from the high-performance features in Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 2000 Server, with which MMIS is tightly integrated. Specifically, these factors contribute to the performance of MMIS:

• Mobile Information Server runs on Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and takes advantage of the Windows 2000 platform to provide high levels of reliability and uptime. MMIS supports most load balancing options available for enterprise servers, such as DNS Round Robin, hardware load balancing solutions, and software solutions such as Windows 2000 Network Load Balancing (NLB). NLB can be used to load balance up to 32 computers running the core Mobile Information Server software, providing your MMIS installation with high levels of reliability. In order to utilize Windows NLB for a network cluster of MMIS servers, MMIS must be installed on Windows 2000 Advanced Server.

• The MMIS Event Source event notification architecture uses the native Exchange 2000 Server event capabilities to ensure that users are notified of incoming information quickly, with minimum impact on the Exchange Server. This design feature enables high-performance notification of events, where the server notifies the end user of new information, such as incoming e-mail.

• Tight integration with Windows 2000 Server improves the overall performance of MMIS because MMIS stores device registration, preferencing, presence, and user data in the highly scalable Windows 2000 Server Active Directory™ service. MMIS can access and retrieve user and device data from the indexed Active Directory database much more quickly than it can from a standard flat-file storage system.

• MMIS—Enterprise Edition and MMIS—Carrier Edition both provide performance counters for monitoring notification and browse service, so system administrators can evaluate and tune the system and perform accurate capacity planning. In addition, MMIS includes event-logging capability.

MMIS Performance

MMIS is designed for both high capacity and performance. The support for mobile users was designed to have minimal impact to existing infrastructure and with scalability in mind (no single points of failure or bottlenecks). Preliminary, internal testing has proven that MMIS is on the right track to meet the needs for mobilizing the Enterprise's mobile populations today, with capacity for future growth.

The following results were based on tests run on a quad processor server (500 MHz) processors Future testing will be conducted to see the relationship between traffic capacity and the addition of MMIS servers. Also, the effects from faster processors and 8-way processor servers will be evaluated. Results and analysis will be shared as more testing is completed, but the expectation is that even greater capacities will be available for MMIS.

Performance and capacity figures are meaningful only if referenced against real life traffic numbers. For example, Europeans exchanged approximately 10 billion Short Messaging Service (SMS) messages in the month of August 2000, which converts to 322 million SMS messages exchanged per day in August, for the entire European population. As an example of corporate email volume, Microsoft's internal email system receives about 2.5 million messages per day for about 40,000 employee inboxes.

Early test results shows that Outlook® mobile access browsing can render about 1.5 million messages per day for Exchange 2000, and about 500,000 messages per day for Exchange 5.5. For both cases, there was negligible effect on the Exchange Server, and certainly no more effect than from regular email access.

For Notification traffic, early tests showed MMIS Enterprise Edition supporting up to 1 million messages per day using SMTP outbound, and approximately 2 million messages a day with an HTTP connection to MMIS-CE. For this notification traffic, there was some impact to the Exchange Server when more than 15% of all emails were forwarded to mobile devices. However, in real life, less than 10% of all incoming emails will be forwarded to mobile devices and not all email users will be mobile enabled. MMIS Carrier Edition tests showed the ability to process about 3 million messages per day.

Based upon the early and positive results from testing, we are confident that MMIS has the capacity to handle the browse and notification traffic for most of our corporate customers. Mobile Information Server will continue to be tested and enhanced to meet even higher levels of performance.

Scalability Features in Microsoft Mobile Information Server

Microsoft Mobile Information Server offers organizations of all sizes a viable solution for wireless data access. As wireless needs grow, corporations and carriers can deploy multiple Microsoft Mobile Information Server-based servers to handle the greater demands on the system.

Organizations can employ a load-balancing system such as Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB), which is built in to Windows 2000 Server, to distribute browse requests and notification messages among multiple Microsoft Mobile Information Server-based servers and to provide additional reliability. System administrators can build out capacity simply by adding new servers.

Enterprise Scalability

To scale in the corporate environment, MMIS servers can be added to handle extra load. In the case of outbound traffic from the Enterprise, it is assumed that Exchange will use SMTP to direct mail to the MMIS Server. The MMIS servers will be represented by an SMTP domain; for example, @MIS-wireless.com. Traffic from the Exchange servers will be forwarded to this domain and additional MMIS servers can be set up as targets for the domain using normal mail routing mechanisms. If MMIS servers are load balanced, as long as the load balanced IP address is registered correctly as the SMTP target for the wireless domain, any server can handle the notification.

For outbound HTTP connections, since a single HTTP connector entry is exposed in the Windows 2000 Active Directory for each MMIS site (and because there is only one site per Active Directory), MMIS servers must be scaled by some IP based load-balancing scheme that is compatible with outbound IPSec. DNS round-robin is the basic topology that is supported. Depending upon further testing, IPSec integrated with Windows NLB may be added to the topology option list; hardware based IPSec compatible load balancing products may be another option. For inbound HTTP connections to the Enterprise, servers should be configured using DNS round-robin or some other IPSec compatible load balancer to allow multiple servers to handle incoming requests.

Features:

• Exchange server pushes notifications to MMIS servers using SMTP. Normal SMTP routing mechanisms can be used for setting up optimal traffic configurations.

• Another option for pushing notifications is to use Microsoft Outlook Mobile Manager (MOMM) at the client. MOMM pushes notifications to the group of MMIS servers using HTTP. MOMM is configured at the client so that the single HTTP connector per site is not an issue.

• Incoming HTTP requests can be served from a round-robin DNS scheme by registering multiple IP addresses in an external DNS. A hardware load balancing product that works with outbound IPSEC sessions can also provide load balancing.

Restrictions:

• NLB support with IPSEC is contingent upon additional testing or availability of hardware NLB solutions compatible with IPSec.

Carrier Scalability

Similar to the Enterprise Scalability model, carriers can also add MMIS Servers as needed to support traffic from multiple corporations. The carrier will expose an IP address for the corporation to establish a link for notification traffic. The carrier has the alternative of exposing one or multiple IP address for connectivity, and can restrict corporate access to particular MMIS servers for selected corporations. MMIS servers should be configured similarly and can be scaled using DNS round-robin or some other IPSEC compatible load balancing scheme. Each MMIS server has an SMS connector, and for each SMS connector the carrier will have to setup port connectivity to the SMSC.

Features:

• Carriers have flexibility in how they can expose IP connectivity to corporations. A single IP could be the entry point for all corporate access (with servers round-robined or load balanced behind the exposed IP) or different servers or groups of servers can be exposed to different corporations.

• By default the WAP gateway talks directly to the MMIS server at the corporation, however, if the MMIS server is configured with the Windows routing service (RRAS) or with proxy server (configured on a secondary NIC), it might be possible to also route browse traffic back through the secure connection to the MMIS server at the corporation. This is not a tested scenario for Version 1.0 but might be attempted by a system integrator.

Restrictions:

• NLB support with IPSEC is contingent upon additional testing or availability of hardware NLB solutions compatible with IPSec.

Cascaded Enterprise and Carrier Scalability

The next diagram simply shows scalability for the Enterprise and the carrier.

Distributed Push

The final consideration is for organizations with regionally distributed Windows 2000 infrastructure.

In a geographically distributed environment, Exchange servers are gathered together into routing groups. For delivery within the routing group, servers directly access each other. For mail that is destined for external domains, servers forward mail to bridgehead servers. Bridgehead servers can then "smarthost" mail for specified domains directly to a destination server.

In the case of MMIS, a domain will be specified for the mobile notifications. The event sink running on Exchange (or even an Exchange forwarding or redirect rule) can then forward mobile notifications from the Exchange server to this domain. The message, because it is destined for an external domain, will be sent to the bridgehead server. That bridgehead server should be configured with a smarthost for the mobility domain that forwards the mail to the MMIS server or the MMIS server cluster.

The MMIS server that is specified in the smarthost of a UK bridgehead, can be different from the MMIS server that is specified in the smarthost of a US routing group, allowing MMIS servers to be located in close geographic proximity to the originating routing group.

Distributed Browse

To geographically distribute browse traffic, it is recommended that for a single corporation, the carrier provision different custom home decks for different geographic regions. This way a corporation that has Exchange servers in the UK and in the US, for example, can have browse requests be redirected back to a WAP server that is closest to the home MMIS and Exchange server for that region. A user with an Exchange mailbox in the UK traveling to the US will still make a request of their UK WAP server and that server will redirect the request to an MMIS server closest to the users UK mailbox. This topology is recommended to avoid the case where an MMIS server in the US would be required to make a series of DAV requests to a very remote UK mail server.

Reliability Features in Microsoft Mobile Information Server

Tightly integrated with Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 2000 Server technology, Microsoft Mobile Information Server delivers reliability features that build on proven Microsoft technologies. For example, Windows 2000 Advanced Server provides Network Load Balancing (NLB) that allows the creation of load-balanced cluster of MMIS servers that evenly distribute the traffic load. It also includes fail-over capabilities so if one server goes offline, the other servers will automatically take over the processing load.

Users will experience no interruption in service, and no data or e-mail will be lost because even if a Mobile Information Server-based server goes offline while pushing a message, the Event Source will automatically retry the push and deliver the message to the user.

Microsoft built the Windows 2000 Server Family targeted 24x7x365 uptime, and five nines reliability. Using Windows 2000's cluster service and network load balancing (NLB) technology, Mobile Information Server takes advantage of Windows 2000's reliability and fault tolerance. In the Aberdeen Group's Executive White Paper entitled Is Microsoft's Windows NT/Windows 2000 Enterprise-Ready? (January 2000), Aberdeen has determined that, under certain circumstances, Windows 2000 operates in large-scale enterprise information environments - with uptime approaching four-nines (i.e., 99.99%) in the real world. Please visit

https://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/news/reviews/dotcoms.asp, for a copy of this Executive White Paper.

Other load balancing options for MMIS installations are Round-Robin DNS and

third party load balancing solutions. Round-robin DNS provides a simple way for DNS servers to distribute load across multiple MIS servers. Because round-robin DNS does not include fail-over capabilities, it is not recommended in most cases. For information about setting up round-robin DNS to work with Mobile Information Server, see the Mobile Information Server Online Help. Mobile Information Server should also work with most third party load balancing solutions. However, check with the vendor to make sure that IPSec is supported. Mobile Information Server uses IPSec to secure outbound notifications.

Performance Monitoring Tools

Mobile Information Server adds new performance monitoring tools to the Windows 2000 Performance Administrative tool. This tool helps administrators to monitor and trouble shoot MMIS performance. For example, performance logs and counters will monitor notification and browse traffic (to/from HTTP connections). This includes quantitative data such as average, shortest and longest processing times. Based upon on analysis of the collected data, administrators can make informed decisions on performance improvements.

Conclusion

Microsoft Mobile Information Server is an extensible, strategic application server that will continually evolve to support new technologies as they become available. By providing solid reliability, scalability, and performance, Microsoft Mobile Information Server can serve as an infrastructure for a wide range of business applications that make the most of wireless access to data and information.

For more product information: https://www.microsoft.com/miserver/