Asta Anchor Server

ASTA clients typically connect to an ASTA server using an IP address and port number. ASTA servers scale quite well but there may be times when you want to have fail over abilities with multiple servers, or just have too many clients to be handled by one server. The ASTA Anchor Server provides load balancing and fail over abilities. Instead of clients connecting directly to a remote ASTA server they connect to the AnchorServer which then finds the next available ASTA server and sends back to the client the IP address of that server. The client disconnects from the Anchor Server and connects to the ASTA server designated by the Anchor Server.

The Anchor Server can be configured to connect to any number of ASTA servers. When the Anchor Server starts up it will attempt to connect to all the ASTA servers and will display the current status of each server. When the Anchor Server starts, it can show the connected number of users for each ASTA server.

If an ASTA Server goes down, all the remote users from that server will be disconnected and will then connect back to the Anchor Server which will hand them off to other ASTA servers. This is the concept meant by fail over. One of the advantages of the N Tier architecture is that once you design your ASTA client application it can scale simply by adding more ASTA servers to be used with the ASTA Anchor Server.

The AstaAnchor server makes use of the Asta Adminstrative Remote API to retrieve information from remote ASTA Servers.

Since the ASTA Anchor Server requires multiple ASTA servers it is not part of the ASTA Entry suite but is part of the ASTA Power Pack and higher licenses.