I want to share some knowledge from the upcoming Best Practices document.
As you might know from the ActiveRoles Sever Quick Start Guide document there are some typical deployment scenarios. Let’s talk about the centralized one.

Centralized scenario means that all ARS instances are  deployed at single data center (say, in North America) and they  manage all local and remote sites/domains (EMEA and APAC, for example), as shown at the picture:

In this case ARS instance in Notrh America (NA) data center (or few for load balancing) are sharing single database. Management History database will provide 7 day history of changes  and is stored as part of configuration database.
As you can see, ARS Service and Web Interface are installed either on separate servers or co-located at one physical server.

EMEA and APAC delegated administrators logon to main NA’s Web Interface connected with NA’s administration service that, in turn, utilize Operation DCs of the region the administrator come from. This model allows the change to happen immediately in the origin region.
This deployment is reccomended for medium- sized companies, or companies with centralized help desk.
In our next post we would provide some best practices on deploying ARS in de-centralized environment with help desk spread across geographical locations.

We are now preparing the document which is supposed to answer typical questions on deployment and initial configuration of ActiveRoles Server, hoping that this would be valuable contribution to the community. The document is based on forum and wiki contents and is intended for those who are going to install, upgrade or just to gain deep inside knowledge on how ActiveRoles works in different deployment scenarios, how traffic is distributed between components, fault tolerance best practices and so on.
If you have suggestions on what do you want to see in the document, please do not hesitate to share in comments.