Hi, Jim Carley here, I work in the directory and service business. My colleague Cuneyt Havlioglu and I presented this morning at TechEd – SVR403 – Building Reliable Solutions Using Transaction Features in Windows Server 2008. Thanks a lot to the folks who were able to make it. If you were not able to be there, here is a very quick summary of what we covered at the session.
We talked about the different participants in a transaction (Application, Resource Manager, and Transaction Manager) and how they relate to each other. We then moved into the main topic for this session – configuring MS Distributed Transaction Coordinator in an Active-Active cluster configuration.
In Windows Server 2003, you are limited to a single MSDTC cluster resource and in fact, in order to conduct ANY transactions on a Windows Server 2003 cluster, you are required to have an MSDTC cluster resource. This limitation of having only one MSDTC resource introduces the following side effects:
1) Being limited to a single MSDTC resource means that other resources in other groups that need to use transactions experience performance degradation when that application resource runs on a different node in the cluster than the MSDTC resource.
2) Two transactional application resources that do not have any relationship to each other except for transactions are both affected if the single MSDTC resource fails.
3) Some products that require transactions to install (such as the action of creating a COM+ package) need to be installed AFTER the MSDTC resource is created, producing install order dependencies.
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