How to install additional CA site?

Hi, there.

I 'm playing with Best Practice Analyzer recently releaseed. When I run it on my farm, following advice was there. Is it really possible to install additional CA sites other than that created on farm creation If yes, great! then how to do it (I think technet should mention that if that is one of best practices...)
Thanks in advance/
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Title:	Highly Available Central Administration Capability
Severity:	3

Description:

Only one instance of the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration Web site exists in your installation. To make sure that you can administer the farm in the case of a failure of a server hosting SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration, you should have SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration installed on at least two servers in the farm.

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How to install additional CA site?

S76
Yes, it will. Pretty much like starting the Web App Service on a farm server brings up IIS sites for all web applications on the farm.
orent
It has to do with Alternate Access Mappings, which have to be modified for the additional CA sites to work. I wonder how AAM looks like for your CA web app if you do what you described (enable 'host CA web site on this server')
ThunderRock

Kiral, I tried what you wrote.
CA Web site was surely created by start CA service, but I can't access and am redirected to existing CA site. If you find the way to provision CA site, please share with us.

I noticed that "host CA web site on this server" option can be specified when add new server to existing farm.
In this case I can access additional CA site. So I come to believe this is the way to go.
MrSock

I guess it is only way to create additional CA site is to reconfigure you server in a farm with SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizzard. Run it on your server and following the tabs choose in Advanced options Use this machine to host the web site in Host CA Web Application.

Good luck!

_Andreas_
bn.srinivasa rao

Haven't tried it myself, but you can try to start the SharePoint CA service on your other web servers in the farm. Just go to the Services on server, select another WFE, choose Custom to show all services available and start the CA service. I think that'll do the trick.
dev_.net
Yes, that definitely works. In a sense the CA web app is no different from other SharePoint web apps. So the same load-balancing techniques apply. Another option to consider here is to set the second CA host's URL as an outgoing URL for a separate zone of the CA web app. This way you will be able to address both CA sites separately with their unique URLs.
Terry M
Hi All,

I have a situation similar to the above, in that we have a 2 node NLB running the front end, with CA running on Node 1. Should node 1 go down, then CA is unavailable.

I've checked in AAM and the load balanced URL for CA is pointing to Node 1. Is it as simple as getting CA running on both nodes, then amending the AAM entry for the CA to point to the load balanced name, thus any connection will be directed to any available web server

Thanks,

Steve
QWERTYtech

kiral, thanks for your response.

My point is that as CA is not just a service but a web site.
I checked on our farm that has 2WFE and 1App(with CA running).
CA service is surely shown on "service on server" screen of WFE. But there isn't application pool/web site for CA on WFE.
Will just starting the service do provisioning stuff

Thanks in advance.
How to install additional CA site?

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