Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF) includes a variety of components that support transaction provisioning. These components include databases, service providers, and other components. This section provides an overview of those components. For more information about them, see Understanding Provisioning Manager. The Microsoft Provisioning Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) contains additional resources to help you deploy MPF. For more information on the SDK and how to use it, see Microsoft Provisioning Framework SDK and documentation.
The core components of MPF include the provisioning engine that provides the fundamental support for processing all provisioning requests. For more information on the core components installed with MPF, see Performing installation tasks. For more information on MPF provisioning engines, see Provisioning engines in Provisioning Manager Help.
The client components of MPF handle client requests received by MPF, including the connections for incoming requests. Client components can include the optional Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) client. For more information on MPF clients, see Clients in Provisioning Manager Help.
The Provisioning Queue Manager service handles all batch and other queued requests that enable the submission of requests for later processing. For more information on MPF Queue Managers, see Queue managers in Provisioning Manager Help.
The Resource Manager engine is responsible for the allocation of resources across all implemented components, including Active Directory resources and any additional provider resources implemented as part of Microsoft Provisioning System. For more information on the MPF Resource Manager, see Resource management.
The Provisioning Manager graphical user interface is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC). You can use it to manage most components of MPF, including each provisioning engine, queue manager, auditing and recovery manager, transaction log, and the audit log. For more information, see Provisioning Manager.
Providers and their namespaces can be included or excluded individually from your MPF installation, depending on your provisioning requirements. These providers and namespaces include the following:
This list does not include the providers and namespaces that are installed separately as Microsoft Provisioning System components after MPF is installed. For more information on all of the providers and namespaces that you can install with Microsoft Provisioning System, see Providers and namespaces.
MPF implements several databases that provide configuration, logging, and resource management support. This includes the following SQL databases:
MPF uses this SQL database to maintain records of all provisioning servers, credentials, and namespaces (and their procedures) installed with MPF. For more information on the configuration database, see Configuration database in Provisioning Manager Help.
MPF uses this SQL database to maintain short-term information about each MPF transaction. If a transaction fails to complete, information from the database can be used to roll back the transaction successfully. You can specify whether to delete data for a completed and failed transaction or to log the data in the audit log database. The Provisioning Auditing and Recovery service is installed with the transaction log component. For more information on MPF transaction logs, see Transaction logs in Provisioning Manager Help. For more information on the Provisioning Auditing and Recovery service, see Auditing and recovery managers in Provisioning Manager Help.
MPF uses this SQL database to maintain records of the transactions that are marked for audit in each procedure. This is the only database that can be accessed directly from SQL. For more information on MPF audit logs, see Audit log in Provisioning Manager Help.
MPF uses this SQL database to maintain the records of resources available to MPF for allocation, as well as records of how resources are currently allocated. This includes the Internet Information Services (IIS) and Exchange resource allocations implemented using Delegated Administration Console. The CoreRMO and BlockModelRMO namespaces provide the procedures required to manage this database. For more information on these two namespaces, see CoreRMO and BlockModelRMO.
MPF uses this SQL database to implement support for the sample Web site. This SQL database is only installed if you installed the Sample Provisioning Web Site and Database component of MPF.
Caution
The Sample Web Site component, which is optional, is useful in a single computer test installation to demonstrate the functionality available in MPF. The sample Web site is not intended to be used in a production environment.
Note