Application Center 2000 and BizTalk Server 2002

Application Center 2000 is a Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server that simplifies the deployment of resources to remote servers. It is designed to make it easy to scale a Web farm and ensure that your applications are highly available. Application Center 2000 provides built-in support for deploying COM+ applications, data sources, file system paths, Registry keys, Web sites and virtual directories. Starting with the release of Service Pack 1, Application Center has also added support for pluggable replication drivers, the BizTalk driver being the first of these.

The Application Center 2000 pluggable replication driver supports deployment of ports (including all objects bound to the port, such as channels), port groups, receive functions, and custom counters. Using the built-in replication drivers, you can now replicate most of a BizTalk configuration with a few easy steps.

With Application Center 2000, you create applications, which are logical groupings of related resources, and then deploy those applications to one or more clusters. Application Center clusters are similar to BizTalk server groups. A BizTalk server group is a grouping of servers that all point to the same database, whereas an Application Center cluster is a grouping of computers with one of the computers being the controller.

BizTalk resources should only be deployed to the cluster controller. With Application Center 2000, the cluster controller is responsible for making sure that all the member computers of the cluster are kept up-to-date with the resources listed in the applications that have been created on that Application Center cluster. All the BizTalk-specific resources, when deployed, go to the central database for that BizTalk server group, and do not need to be replicated to each of the members.