How should I use the BizTalk adapters in a group?

Use an Active/Active configuration for load balancing.' pubdate='04/25/2014' > Since you can have a single host with multiple host instances on different servers in a group that are both active at the same time, we will consider the impact on the use of the adapters we offer.

Load Balancing
This would be considered an Active/Active configuration. In a load balancing scenario where all servers in a group are active at the same time, any BizTalk artifact associated with the host will be active. So it's possible for two instances of a receive location to be active at the same time.

While this does not pose any problem for send adapters, since our receive adapters are based on a pull model (excluding the AS2 adapter) this could potentially cause a problem. The reason for this is that the two instances of the receive location will operate independently of each other and may result in multiple copies of the same message. The solution here is to create a host instance that is only active on one server in the group, or to implement some logic to handle the possibility of multiple copies of messages.

Reliability
If your ultimate goal is reliability (failover configuration) you would want to use an Active/Passive configuration. In this type of configuration there are no special considerations when using the adapter since only one instance of each receive location and send port will be active at one time.

Should you have any questions about how to use the adapters in your environment please feel free to e-mail support@nsoftware.com