Microsoft | Learning FAST University | Deployment Options for FSIS Components

This article discusses the deployment options for the FSIS components, specifically, the IMS UI Toolkit, the IMS and CTS engines, the Content Distributor Emulator and the FSIS Admin components.

Production Minimum:

The graphic above describes the minimum number of servers required for the FSIS components in a production environment.

• One server running IIS will host the IMS UI Toolkit components
• A second server will host FSIS Services in standalone mode. This server will host the IMS and CTS engines, the Content Distributor Emulator and the FSIS Admin components
• A third server will host the ESP search core and the FSIS Feeding Overlay

Production with Multiple Servers:

The graphic above describes a more likely production environment.

A multi-host (distributed) FSIS constellation consists of the following:

• A primary administration host
• Zero or more fallback administration hosts
• Zero or more worker hosts  

Fault Tolerant FSIS Administration

The Primary Admin service is the only service capable of generating security certificates used for communication between FSIS server and FSIS and the IMS UI Toolkit. Fallback Admin services perform all functions of a Primary Admin service except generate certificates. To achieve fault tolerance the admin service uses a majority rule; the majority of the services must be running to continue processing. Therefore, an environment which can sustain a single failure needs three Admin services, a primary and two fallback services. Five admin services would be required to handle 2 server failures.

Worker Services

CTS, CDE and IMS are collectively called the Worker Services or Nodes

Nodes are configured as follows:

• CTS and IMS are installed and configured on Worker servers. Either service can be removed after installation
• CTS and IMS can be configured on any Admin service server after installation
• CDE must always be configured after installation on any server
• Up to 9 Nodes in any combination can be configured on a host.

Depending on feeding rate, batch size, document size and flow complexity multiple CTS services may be required. Also, the CTS service can be configured to use more memory. Because the CDE is used by CTS and it requires less than 500 MB of memory CDE is normally configured on the same servers as CTS.

IMS is configured on the same servers as CTS by default. To free memory for CTS the IMS services can be moved to the Admin Services servers. IMS services use less than 1 GB of memory while Administration services use 500 MB. To increase throughput for IMS additional Nodes can be added to a host.

Fault Tolerance is achieved by adding additional Worker Service servers.

To learn more about FAST University, and register for classes please visit www.fastuniversity.com or contact an Education Consultant at fastuniv@microsoft.com.