Installing and configuring AssetTrack in a web farm
AssetTrack Servers can be installed in a web farm or cluster configuration without the use of affinity/persistence.
There are a number of configuration steps required during the setup/configuration phase to enable this.
- The same version of AssetTrack Server must be installed on all application servers.
- The ASP.NET machine key setting value must be synchronized across all application servers.
- If your installation requires an Importer service, only one instance of the Importer must be running.
- Within AssetTrack Server settings, the "Mobile device refresh interval" setting must be set to 90 minutes.
- All AssetTrack Servers must share the same logical SQL Server database.
- Configuring your load balancer
On this page:
AssetTrack Server installation on all nodes
AssetTrack Server must be installed on all application server nodes that are participating in the web farm or cluster.
Synchronizing ASP.NET machine key values on all nodes
If you deploy your application in a Web farm, you must ensure that the configuration files on each server share the same value for validationKey and decryptionKey, which are used for hashing and decryption respectively. This is required because you cannot guarantee which server will handle successive requests.
With manually generated key values, the <machineKey> settings should be similar to the following example.
<machineKey validationKey="21F090935F6E49C2C797F69BBAAD8402ABD2EE0B667A8B44EA7DD4374267A75D7 AD972A119482D15A4127461DB1DC347C1A63AE5F1CCFAACFF1B72A7F0A281B" decryptionKey="ABAA84D7EC4BB56D75D217CECFFB9628809BDB8BF91CFCD64568A145BE59719F" validation="SHA1" decryption="AES" />
Ensuring that only one instance of the Import Service is running
If you have AssetTrack integrated with a repository system (e.g. CA APM, Service Desk, HP Asset Manager, or file integration), the Importer is the component that keeps AssetTrack in sync with your repository. Only one Importer should be running within your web farm to eliminate the possibility of anomalies created by multiple imports running at the same time. The simplest way that this can be accomplished by only installing the Importer on a single machine.
Avoiding a single point of failure, however, is part of the reason for using a web farm, and a single Importer is a single point of failure. The workaround for this to install multiple instances of the Importer (typically each AssetTrack Server machine is also used to host the Importer), but disable all but one Importer. This can be done in Windows Scheduled Tasks by right-clicking the Scheduled Task and disabling the task.
Setting mobile device refresh interval
AssetTrack Server's has a setting that called "Mobile device refresh interval." This setting specifies the number of minutes between rebuilds of the SQL Mobile databases that are downloaded by AssetTrack Mobile when a sync plan runs. This setting should be set to 120, meaning that these database files will be rebuilt every 120 minutes.
All AssetTrack Servers sharing the same logical database
AssetTrack Server is backed by a SQL Server database, and all instances of AssetTrack Server across all nodes must share the same logical data. This is not to say that all AssetTrack Servers must be connecting to the same physical database. If you want to take advantage of clustering, replication, or other data tier technology to increase redundancy and availability, you can do that, but at any given moment, the data must be identical for all AssetTrack Servers.
Configuring your load balancer
AssetTrack Server does not require your load balancer to allow affinity/persistence. During a user session, client requests can be serviced by any node in the farm.