General Description

The LanScape Service Manager® suite is a software "package" that allows you to execute all LanScape VOIP server software and just about any other Windows 32 bit GUI and console application as a native Windows NT service or as a Windows service. This has many advantages over simply developing and running your server software as a native service or as a standard Windows application process.

Just about any Windows application can be executed on the server host machine as an NT service or a Windows service. Batch files, script files, Windows console applications and a large number of GUI applications can successfully be executed as a service.

If you are developing your application to be used with the LanScape Service Manager®, then you have full control over your application and can take steps to "design in" the necessary functionality that will allow your application to be 100% compatible with running as a service. There are only a few minor guidelines you must follow to make sure your applications are able to be started as a child process of the service manager and stopped gracefully when the host system gets shut down.

The primary advantage of running your Windows applications as a service is that the application will be started when the host machine is started. It does not matter if a user logs into the server machine or not. The application will also automatically shutdown gracefully when the server host machine shuts down.

There are many other advantages of running server software as a service. When you run your server software as a service, your server software can be monitored for execution faults and can be restarted if required. Deploying server software as a service will assist you in deploying a "high availability" system that will experience minimal down time as compared to server products from other vendors.


Note:

Server software can be installed as a service if you use Windows NT 4.x (Service Pack 6a), 2000, XP, 2003 or higher. Server software cannot be installed as a service if you are using Windows 95, 98, or Me operating systems.

Benefits of running applications (servers) as a service:

Automatically start and stop the server software when the host machine starts/stops.

Monitor the server software for unhandled fault situations.

Automatically restart the server software if faults occur.

Periodically restart the server software if need be to help preserve long term overall server stability.

Create log file data that reflects the fault monitoring activity of the server software .

Running most server software as a service is generally required in secure network environments.



Introduction: The LanScape Service Manager™

In order to obtain the highest level of control and fault tolerant behavior from server software and the server host machine, the server software is controlled, monitored and managed by LanScape's Service Manager software. The LanScape Service Manager has been designed to function seamlessly together with server applications to offer a level of up time performance not achievable by using a stand alone server process or a stand alone NT or Windows service. The term "service manager" will be used throughout this document to describe the LanScape Service Manager product suite.

The service manager is used to support all of the added capabilities normal native Windows operating system services cannot support. The LanScape Service Manager product suite consists of three program executables:
 

The service manager must be installed on the same host machine that will be running your server software. The following graphic below shows the graphical user interface of the LanScape Service Manager™ console:








If you have installed multiple server products (server applications) to the same host machine, you can use a single service manager to control and manage all of your server software. This means installing the LanScape Service Manager service once for all server applications. You do not have to run more than one instance of the service manager service on the same host machine.