Prepare a Shared Network Folder for Caching Service Configuration Settings

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This topic describes the general steps of preparing a shared network folder so that it can be used to store cluster configuration settings for the cache system. Use this topic if you are planning to use the XML provider to store Caching Service configuration data, rather than a database provider such as the SQL provider. The steps in this topic are unnecessary if you are going to use a database provider.

Instead of using a shared network folder, you can choose to store your cache cluster configuration settings in a SQL Server database. There are many factors to consider when choosing which store is right for your application. For enterprise applications, we highly recommend that you use a SQL Server database for storing cluster configuration settings. For smaller applications or development workstation scenarios, the ease of creating a shared network folder may outweigh the availability benefits of SQL Server. For more information, see Cluster Configuration Storage Options (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=193172). For more information about the configuration steps, see Configure AppFabric.

For more detailed information about using a shared network folder as the cluster configuration storage location, see Shared Folder-Based Cluster Configuration (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=193174).

To prepare a shared folder to store the Caching Service configuration settings

  1. Select the appropriate server to host the shared network folder.

  2. Create the shared network folder. For more information about performing this step, refer to the help for the operating system on that computer.

  3. Explicitly grant permissions to the security identity that will be performing the cache server configuration. The identity used for installation needs Administrator rights on the server hosting the shared network folder so that the installation program can grant permissions to the cache servers for the shared network folder.

  4. Each of the cache host security identities needs read-only permissions on the Caching Service configuration shared folder. This step is done automatically by the AppFabric Configuration Wizard for each of the cache servers. Depending on the operating system, these permissions may be referred to as Contributor, Change, Write, and Read.

  2012-09-12