When deploying the Administration Service, you might need to import configuration data from an existing database to ensure that the new Administration Service instance has the same configuration as the existing one. Importing configuration data to a newly created database instead of attaching the Administration Service to an existing database is necessary if the version of the Administration Service you are deploying is greater than the version of the database you want to use. Some examples of such a situation are the following:
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Upgrading the Administration Service while preserving its configuration.
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Restoring configuration data from a backup copy of the database whose version does not match the version of the Administration Service.
When upgrading the Administration Service, you must import configuration data from the earlier version of Active Roles to the new version of the product. To do so, in the Configuration Center, click Administration Service > Import Configuration, then follow the steps in the wizard that appears. For more information, see Importing configuration data in the Active Roles Installation Guide or Active Roles Upgrade Guide.
During the import operation, the wizard retrieves and upgrades the data from the source database, and replaces the data in the destination database with the upgraded data from the source database.
You can script the configuration operations available in the Configuration Center using the Windows PowerShell command-line tools of the Active Roles Management Shell. For more information, see About Active Roles Management Shell.
After configuring the Administration Service, the Management History data storage will be empty with the option to create a new database. During the import of configuration data, the Configuration Center transfers only the administrative right assignments, policy definitions, administrative view settings, workflow definitions and other parameters that determine the Active Roles work environment. Management History data is excluded from the import operation to reduce the time it takes to upgrade the configuration of the Administration Service.
The Management History data describes changes that were made to directory data via Active Roles. This includes information about directory data management tasks, such as:
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The changes a user performed.
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The users performing the changes.
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The time the change was performed.
The Management History data is used for change history and user activity reports. In addition, the Management History data storage holds information about various tasks related to approval workflows and temporal group memberships.
After configuring the Administration Service and importing configuration data from an existing database, you must take additional steps to transfer the Management History data. You can do this using the Import Management History wizard in the Active Roles Configuration Center.
Importing Management History data is similar to the task of importing configuration data. However, there are some important differences:
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Due to a much larger volume of Management History data compared to configuration data, importing Management History data might take longer.
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As Management History data has dependencies on configuration data, you must import the configuration data first. You can import the Management History data after that, if needed.
Because of these considerations, Configuration Center provides a different wizard for importing Management History. The main features of the Import Management History wizard are the following:
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The wizard does not replace the existing data in the destination database. It only retrieves and upgrades Management History records from the source database, then adds the upgraded records to the destination database.
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The wizard allows you to specify the date range for the Management History records you want to import, so you can import only records that occurred within a particular timeframe instead of importing all records at a time.
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Canceling the wizard while the import operation is in progress does not cause you to lose the import results, so you can stop the import operation at any time. The records imported by the time that you cancel the wizard are retained in the destination database. If you start the wizard again, the wizard only imports records that were not imported earlier.
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Optionally, you can also synchronize SQL Server users and login data, but only if the destination database is also hosted on an SQL Server. Synchronizing users between SQL Server and Azure SQL is not supported.
For more information, see Importing Management History data in the Active Roles Installation Guide or Active Roles Upgrade Guide.
The Administration Service page of the Active Roles Configuration Center indicates the states of the service with the following status labels:
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Ready for use: Administration Service is running and is ready to process requests.
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Getting ready: Administration Service just started and is preparing to process client requests.
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Stopping: Administration Service is preparing to stop.
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Stopped: Administration Service is not running.
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Unknown: Configuration Center cannot check the state of Administration Service.
After installing Active Roles, you can perform the initial configuration of the Web Interface in the Configuration Center, preparing the component for use. Then, you can use the Configuration Center to:
