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.

Now it is hardly to find an architecture that does not claim to be fault tolerant or even provides this feature. Let us take a look for example at fault-tolerance ideas to world economy…well, yeah, it’s too late for talks. Let us talk about fault tolerance in ActiveRoles instead.
In the same way Active Directory is not fault tolerant with a single domain controller ActiveRoles Server is not fault tolerant when a single server running the ActiveRoles Server administration service is deployed. It is critical that at least two servers running the Administration Service be deployed to have a fault tolerant deployment.
An additional benefit is that both the MMC console and the web interfaces will fail-over to a new Administration Service if the first service becomes unresponsive. The user experience is slightly different depending on what interface is used when the administration service crashes. Within the MMC console the user will notice the administration service has stopped and will only have to use the Connect command to automatically connect to the next available service. Users of the web interface will have a more seamless transition as the web site fails over automatically to the next Administration Service. One important item to note is that automatic failover only works if the option ‘Any available Administration Service’ was selected during the Web Interface setup.
WRT database, ActiveRoles supports SQL cluster technology for database high availability. Database mirroring is to come in the nearest future. Note, that if you have SQL Server and ARS installed at different servers (and if stars are in right positions on the sky) existing MMC and Web Interface sessions may still may available (with certain functionality disabled) and AD changes will be applied to AD successfully.
Keep in mind that even in the worse case scenario where all ActiveRoles Servers fail, Active Directory will continue to function normally. The only result of a complete failure is that day-to-day administration or help desk functions may be interrupted until a server is brought back online.
Also, check out this wiki link that can be extremely useful in fault tolerance deployment

Hello again!
A lot of our customers are asking ActiveRoles team…well, they do not directly ask “Why it is working so slowly?”or “Is my Celeron 800 with 128 MB of RAM is enough for running 10K environment?”, they rather ask about dull things like deployment, upgrade or operation best practices. Of course, we do not advice to get separate Xeons for each of ARS architectural components and prepared ActiveRoles wiki content for those who are willing to predict possible bottlenecks and design limitations while deploying ARS: http://wiki.activeroles.inside.quest.com/index.php/ARS_Documentation_Home
In spite of the word ‘documentation’ this section contains very useful advices based on the feedback we get from our customers.
Also, if you are looking for hardware resource information consider using resource usage calculator, which is XLS file with some formulas that can help you to find what amount of RAM or hard disk space is required for operating your environment. You can find it on ActiveRoles CD or here: http://wiki.activeroles.inside.quest.com/index.php/ARS_Product_Documentation_-_Resource_Usage_Calculator
I will keep you up to date while we continue to publish performance-related updates on community site.

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