AppFabric Caching Deployment and Management Guide

The purpose of this guide is to provide guidance and examples of how to deploy and manage a Windows Server AppFabric cache cluster. This guide is meant to complement the existing documentation on the caching features of AppFabric and will often reference that documentation to provide additional technical depth. You can locate this guide at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921020.aspx. 

Introduction

Applications often create their own in-memory caches as a performance enhancement, but these caches are limited by the memory on the computer that hosts the application. AppFabric caching features support an in-memory cache that can be distributed across multiple servers. These servers are called cache hosts. An AppFabric cache cluster can be expanded just by adding cache hosts, but the application can still access the cache cluster as a single entity. For more information, see AppFabric Caching Concepts and Architecture.

This guide assumes that you are working with applications that use AppFabric caching features. The goal is to describe the steps of setting up a new cache cluster, creating caches for applications, monitoring the cache cluster health, and troubleshooting problems. The guide attempts to address the most common scenarios in the hopes that this information gives you important skills to work with all areas of cache cluster deployment and management.

Who Should Read this Guide?

• IT Professionals that administer AppFabric cache clusters.
• ISVs that want to customize AppFabric caching solutions for customers.

What's in this Guide?

• Deploying and Configuring AppFabric Caching Features: This section provides guidance for deploying and configuring a new cache cluster. This includes using Windows PowerShell to add and remove cache hosts.
• Common Cache Cluster Management Tasks: This section provides Windows PowerShell examples for common cache cluster management tasks.
• Managing Cache Cluster Health: This section discusses the tools available for monitoring the health of a cache cluster. It also provides a health checklist.
• Troubleshooting: This section covers common cache cluster issues and also related exceptions that cache-enabled application might experience.
• Appendix 1: Table of Error Code Strings:The table in this appendix lists the various error codes that are seen in application exception messages. It connects these codes to exceptions that a developer can handle in the application code.