Windows service Bus evaluation

Question

My management is evaluating non-Azure Microsoft Windows Service Bus (Azure is out of consideration for security reasons). It will be used to setup topic/subscription model with a number of WCF services with netMessagingBinding that we building, so I just have a few basic questions about that.

1. Are there any specific hardware requirements like dedicated server, dedicated database etc. for WSB to run in production environment?
2. It's easy to configure WCF service to listen on a specific topic subscription. Is there any way for WCF service to listen to multiple subscriptions?

Appreciate the answers.

Answer 1

1. You can install the service components and the databases all on one server (that is the default). However, for a number of reasons, we installed the services on a dedicated app server and then created the Service bus databases on an existing database server. The install package allows you to specify a different db server. Check this article for the minimum server requirements

2. Yes you can get one WCF service to listen to multiple subscriptions. You would need to create two (or more) System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost instances and then run them inside one process. For example we had one windows service running two ServiceHost's. Each host listened at a different queue and therefore implemented a different contract. This meant where queues were logically grouped we didn't need a new windows service per queue. You could do the same with subscriptions.

Answer 2

For question one, you will have to go through the exercise of hardware sizing. the good news is that WCF services can scale vertically, so you can add up servers if there were issues in handling client load.

To do hardware sizing you will have to make an estimate the expected load and then do performance/scalablity testing to figure the load bearing capacity of your serviceBus/services .

you could find a lot of resources for load testing like this one http://seroter.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/testing-out-the-new-appfabric-service-bus-relay-load-balancing/

once you do load testing and come up with the numbers, you can then do sizing using references like this one http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx