Plan High Availability for MIIS

Plan High Availability for MIIS

To facilitate high availability of your Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003, Enterprise Edition data, you can create an MIIS failover clustered server configuration. MIIS failover clustering is a process in which Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4) work together to provide application availability when an application or piece of hardware fails, or when an operating-system error occurs. Failover clustering provides hardware redundancy by transferring mission-critical resources from a failing machine to a server with an identical configuration. Failover clustering also allows you to perform system maintenance on a computer while work continues uninterrupted on another node, thus minimizing system downtime.

If you want to create a high-availability MIIS configuration, you can do either of the following:

• Create a warm standby MIIS server as a failover backup for your primary MIIS server. - In this configuration, your primary and standby MIIS servers will both access a single remote server running SQL Server 2000 SP4, Enterprise Edition.

  See the first figure for an illustration of this high-availability configuration.

• Create a warm standby MIIS server as a failover backup for your primary MIIS server, with SQL Server 2000 SP4, Enterprise Edition clustering. - In this configuration, your primary and standby MIIS servers will access a clustered remote SQL Server configuration. Clustering SQL Server creates additional fault tolerance to further enhance the availability of data stores for your primary and backup MIIS servers.

  See the second figure for an illustration of the high-availability configuration with SQL clustering.

Figure: High-availability deployment configuration with remote SQL Server 2000 SP4 installation

When deploying MIIS in the high availability configuration with a single remote SQL Server 2000 SP4 installation, you will need to configure parameters such as security contexts; the default or named SQL Server instance; the transport, protocol, or port that SQL Server uses for connections from other computers; and the encryption key set for the warm standby server.

Figure: High-availability deployment configuration with remote clustered SQL Server 2000 SP4 installation

When deploying MIIS in the high-availability configuration with a clustered remote SQL Server 2000 SP4 installation, you will need to perform a lengthy series of steps to set up the clustered failover configuration.

For information about setting up a clustered SQL Server 2000 SP4 configuration, see the SQL Server documentation.

Activating the Warm Standby MIIS Server

To activate the warm standby server, open a command window, change the directory to the Bin\ folder of the MIIS installation path, and then run MIISact.exe. The default MIIS installation path is %systemdrive%\Program Files\Microsoft Identity Integration Server.

The program MIISact.exe requests your encryption key set backup file. To avoid losing data, be sure that you back up your encryption key set every time you create new keys. You must provide the backup key set to MIISact.exe to ensure that MIIS can manage your encrypted data and use the credentials that are part of those management agents that require passwords for connections.

MIIS automatically manages the custom extensions in your %systemdrive%\Program Files\Microsoft Identity Integration Server\Extensions\ folder and ensures that all extensions that were present the last time MIIS ran on the primary server are now available on the secondary server.