Administering provisioning servers

You can use Provisioning Manager to configure and monitor properties and other settings for each type of provisioning server.

Clients

Clients receive incoming provisioning requests and route them to the following Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF) components:

Clients also perform load-balancing functions across provisioning engines and queue managers.

For more information on configuring and administering clients, see Administering clients

Provisioning engines

Provisioning engines are transaction coordinators that execute Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF) requests in real time. They receive MPF requests from clients and queue managers, and then attempt to parse, expand, and route the requests to specified providers. Provisioning engines process requests using the run-time properties defined in the configuration database. Provisioning engines maintain contextual information and transaction state. After failures, provisioning engines issue rollback calls and manage rollback data. When a transaction completes or rolls back, the appropriate provisioning engine sends the transaction state to a transaction log.

For more information on configuring and administering provisioning engines, see Administering provisioning engines

Queue managers

The Provisioning Queue Manager service runs as a Windows 2000 service. Queue managers act as transaction coordinators for queued requests. Queue managers store Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF) requests that do not need to be executed immediately in a queue for later processing. Queue managers forward each queued request to a provisioning engine that has available capacity.

Requests can be submitted to queue managers in activated mode or suspended mode, depending on when they will enter the queue. Activated requests enter the queue immediately. Suspended requests remain pending, sometimes as placeholders for other jobs or because of a dependent action that must first complete.

Queue managers are specific to Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF) and not directly related to Message Queuing.

For more information on configuring and administering queue managers, see Administering queue managers

Auditing and recovery managers

The Provisioning Auditing and Recovery Manager service is installed by default when you install the transaction log database component of Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF). It then runs as a Windows 2000 service. Each transaction log and audit log is bound to a specific auditing and recovery manager, which constantly monitors MPF components and detects failures in provisioning engines.

For transaction processing, the auditing and recovery manager periodically cleans up the transaction log. For permanent storage, you can set MPF to move selected transactions to the audit log for data warehousing.

Using Custom Audit Provider, you can save audit data to custom tables or manipulate audit data before it goes in the audit log. However, Custom Audit Provider does not verify the existence of custom tables or attributes, if, for example, MPF has permission to write to a custom table in the database.

If MPF cannot successfully complete a Custom Audit command, it inserts the command into the Bad Commands table of the transaction log database and inserts an error event into the event log. After a specified time-out, it continues to try to execute the bad command, in anticipation that the problem can be resolved.

Caution

For more information on configuring and administering auditing and recovery managers, see Administering auditing and recovery managers

Transaction logs

Transaction logs store short-term information about each Microsoft Provisioning Framework (MPF) transaction. This data store is an SQL database. 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.

Caution

For more information on configuring and administering transaction logs, see Transaction logs.

Audit log

The audit log is an SQL database that serves as a repository for data mining. Audit logs contain details about transactions, including the number of transactions and the success or failure of each transaction. You can specify whether to implement auditing for each procedure.

Caution

For more information on configuring and administering the audit log, see Audit log