[Doubts] How to make WCF/WF service more scalable thru AppFabric ?

Question

Hi,

I've been going thru the documents/Videos of AppFabric and I've a small question.

Question 1:

I've created a WCF/WF service. I want to scale this out to multiple AppFabric servers. To what I've understood so far is once the WCF/WF is ready, we can deploy it on a webserver on IIS having AppFabric installed, right. So I'll be able to configure and monitor my WCF/WF service thru AppFabric Dashboard.

Now if I want to deploy the same WCF service on another AppFabric server for scaling, I would need to manually deploy it (or thru web deployment package) on another webserver having appfabric installed. Am I correct ?

So these 2 servers having appfabric, one of them will be acting as lead host, right?

Question 2:

Moreover I'm also confused in a scenario wherein - if I've my asp.net application using wcf service then the asp.net app will be deployed over IIS on a webserver. Now in order to have different layer of appfabric servers to scale wcf service, I'll need to have a set of webservers having appfabric installed.

In other words two tiers having multiple webservers. First tier to host my asp.net application (where appfabric is not installed). Second tier to host my wcf service and use appfabric caching where appfabric is installed.

Essentially these two tiers both are webservers just that first one doesn't have appfabric installed but second tier has.

Is my understand correct here?

My apologies if these questions sound very simple to you. if these are already answered can you point me in the right direction?

-Sagar

Answer 1

For one, you have various options.  For deployment you can use the web farm stuff and it will automatically be synchronized between your IIS servers.  You can install this through the web platform installer.

In terms of failover, you could use a WCF routing service, something custom, NLB, or a load balancing appliance.  This way when one of your instances is unavailable (fundamentally, or it's not correctly handling requests) you can direct messages to your other server.

For second one, you can use the same hosts or separate them out.  Appfabric being installed is up to you, no reason you can't put it on your ASP.NET app servers.