Your AIF topology depends upon the type of integration you need in your environment. The Application Object Server (AOS) forms the key component of the infrastructure as the application server for the Microsoft Dynamics AX application. One or more of the following infrastructure components are required depending upon your integration needs.

• AIF Web services:AIF Web services require Internet Information Services (IIS). You need to estimate the workload that will be generated by these Web services. You can deploy AIF Web services on a dedicated IIS server or IIS farm, or you can share an IIS server or IIS farm with other Microsoft Dynamics AX components such as Workflow, Enterprise Portal, and report server. We recommend deploying AIF Web services on a dedicated IIS server or a dedicated IIS farm. For up-to-date hardware and software requirements for Microsoft Dynamics AX, see the system requirements Web page.

• BizTalk Server adapter:Microsoft Dynamics AX includes a BizTalk adapter that is required to integrate with Microsoft BizTalk Server. The BizTalk adapter is deployed on the BizTalk Server host. We recommend that you deploy BizTalk Server on a dedicated server in the production environment. You can either deploy a single BizTalk Server or create a BizTalk infrastructure optimized for availability and scalability. For more information on high-availability deployment of BizTalk, see BizTalk Server TechCenter.

• MSMQ adapter:You must install Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) on a computer on the network and create at least one public queue to configure the Microsoft Dynamics AX MSMQ Adapter.

• File System adapter:You must enable and configure at least one file system directory (folder) for inbound messages and one for the outbound messages.

Consider the following when you calculate expected workload for AIF:

• Determine the workload generated by external applications using AIF Web Services, the MSMQ adapter, the File System adapter, and the BizTalk Server adapter.

• Consider enabling the new parallelism enhancement in the AIF if you expect high data volume through asynchronous message processing. The parallelism enhancements allow you to scale your asynchronous message processing across all the AOS servers that are configured as batch servers.

• The AIF parallelism mentioned above uses the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 batch framework and batch servers for processing messages. You need to carefully consider the load the incoming messages will generate on the batch servers and plan your clusters and the number of AOS servers within each cluster accordingly. For considerations on planning a batch server, see Batch server. For setting up and configuring a batch server, see Server and Database Administration Guide.

• Consider placing AOS servers processing AIF messages in a separate cluster from AOS servers used by clients and other Microsoft Dynamics AX components if you are processing a high volume of asynchronous messages. By creating a dedicated AOS cluster for clients, you can segregate batch servers and ensure proper throughput and response time for online clients. For more information on AOS clustering and AOS configuration, see Application Object Server topology.

For step-by-step installation instructions of Microsoft Dynamics AX components, see the Installation Guide. For more information on configuration of these components and adapters, see the Server and Database Administration Guide.

Sample deployment scenarios range from a single-server deployment to a large-scale distributed deployment. The scenarios are provided to assist you in planning your infrastructure and server requirements. These scenarios do not provide any infrastructure-sizing guidelines. For more information, see Sample deployment scenarios.