Scheduling Job in a Web Farm

[pranshu]

Hello,
I have a farm of .NET servers. The application also needs scheduled
jobs - like sending reports / notifications periodically.
The question is - what is the best way to schedule this job?
I want the same set of software to run on all machines - so that if in
case one machine goes down, the other is able to run the scheduled job.
The options I am considering:

1) making them SQL Server jobs ( which are failed over in a cluster),
but these jobs need resources available on the .NET servers, and I
donot think that opening a backward connectivity from DB to App would
be the best way.

2) To have some kind of a lock in the database, and schedule the job on
all the machines in windows scheduler. The one which wakes up first,
gets the lock and executes the job. The others just exit.

3) Same as 2, but windows service instead of scheduled job. In this
case - I am unable to find a good way of allowing users to schedule the
job. Is there a library which can read a unix style cron job setting
and run the programs accordingly?

Is there a better way of doing this ? Are there any clustered scheduler
available for windows?

Regards
Pranshu

[Ignacio Machin \( .NET/ C# MVP \)]

Hi,

Not clear how this is related to C# , reading your post it seems is more
related to win admin than to C# programming language.

You better post this in a Win Server NG
--
--
Ignacio Machin,
ignacio.machin AT dot.state.fl.us
Florida Department Of Transportation

"pranshu" <pr*********@gmail.comwrote in message
news:11**********************@35g2000cwc.googlegro ups.com...

Hello,
I have a farm of .NET servers. The application also needs scheduled
jobs - like sending reports / notifications periodically.
The question is - what is the best way to schedule this job?
I want the same set of software to run on all machines - so that if in
case one machine goes down, the other is able to run the scheduled job.
The options I am considering:

1) making them SQL Server jobs ( which are failed over in a cluster),
but these jobs need resources available on the .NET servers, and I
donot think that opening a backward connectivity from DB to App would
be the best way.

2) To have some kind of a lock in the database, and schedule the job on
all the machines in windows scheduler. The one which wakes up first,
gets the lock and executes the job. The others just exit.

3) Same as 2, but windows service instead of scheduled job. In this
case - I am unable to find a good way of allowing users to schedule the
job. Is there a library which can read a unix style cron job setting
and run the programs accordingly?

Is there a better way of doing this ? Are there any clustered scheduler
available for windows?

Regards
Pranshu

[pranshu]

Hi Ignacio,
The relation to C# is - that I am evaluating how to develop this job:
As a service
As a console exe
As a .NET remoting/ web service component which can be triggered by DTS

I am sure many people in this thread would have written batch jobs and
would have opinions on the way to go.
Personally, I have created such jobs as console applications in the
past and have left it for the administrator to figure out how to run
it. However while talking to collegues working on Java, they indicated
that they make such classes run within Quartz or Flux - which are
clustered schedulers in Java with ability to invoke Java classes.

I coulnot find anything equivalent - which could trigger .NET classes.

Pranshu