AppFabric Cache and Windows 7

Question

Any recommendations for running an AppFabric Cache cluster on Windows 7 professional machines? I am planning to have 3 nodes, and setup High Availability. Please suggest. The below mentioned will be my client configuration:

<dataCacheClient requestTimeout="60000" channelOpenTimeout="15000" maxConnectionsToServer="2">
    <localCache isEnabled="true" sync="NotificationBased" ttlValue="300000" objectCount="100000" />
    <clientNotification pollInterval="10" maxQueueLength="100000" />
    <hosts>
      <host name="********" cachePort="********" />      
    </hosts>
    <securityProperties mode="Transport" protectionLevel="EncryptAndSign" />
    <transportProperties connectionBufferSize="131072" maxBufferPoolSize="268435456" maxBufferSize="8388608" maxOutputDelay="2" channelInitializationTimeout="60000" receiveTimeout="600000" />
  </dataCacheClient>

Answer 1

High Availability is only available on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition - Windows 7 hosts will not support it.

I'd think very carefully about this setup - Windows 7 is not designed as a 'server-scale' operating system, you get things like application crashes or unexpected restarts from Windows Updates that could mean not all your cache hosts are always going to be available. I'd also very much doubt that Microsoft would support this configuration for a production system, or would at least strongly recommend against it.

By all means try it, test it extensively, but be prepared for it to fail.

Answer 2

If you can use SqlServer as caching configuration provider then your cache cluster would remain running even with just one cache node because in that case sql server acts as your cluster manager. For more info, please visit here and here

In pure HA environment, your data is duplicated across machines so if you lose one of the machines then you still have availability of your cache cluster. Three machines are recommended and you need minimum of two at any time otherwise your cache cluster will come down if you get to just one machine.

The only problem with my sql server approach is if you lose any machine then you have to take a hit to get the data from source. If you are OK with that then you have HA with fraction of cost as compared with licenses of three Windows enterprise servers.

P.S. - I have tested, used this setup on two windows standard servers. As other user has also mentioned Windows 7 is not recommended but you can go with it.