Communication with Zones and Logical Servers

In Logical Datacenter Designer, you can define communication paths between zones and logical servers through their endpoints. Connection lines appear on the diagram with arrows showing the direction of communication. For more information, see Overview of Endpoints on Zones and Logical Servers.

Communication Into and Out of Zones

You can change the direction of communication through a zone. Each zone endpoint specifies inbound, outbound, or bidirectional communication. You can control the type of communication in and out of a zone by setting zone communication constraints in the Settings and Constraints Editor. For more information, see How to: Control Communication Across Zones.

Restricting Zone Traffic to a Particular Port

Using the ServerBindings and SecureBindings settings on zone endpoints, you can write constraints that specify which ports that allow HTTP or HTTPS traffic. Using the FTP sample from the SDM SDK, you can do the same for FTP traffic. For more information, see How to: Restrict HTTP and HTTPS Traffic into a Zone to a Specific Port.

Constraints on Zone and Logical Server Endpoints

Communication constraints written on zone endpoints indicate the types of communication providers that can connect to the zone. All communication originates from logical server endpoints, and the types of endpoint indicate the type of communication. For example, HTTP communication occurs over an HTTPClientEndpoint, while database communication occurs over a DatabaseServerEndpoint. By selecting a zone endpoint and allowing or disallowing one of these endpoints to connect to the zone endpoint, you are allowing or disallowing the associated type of communication from passing through the zone endpoint. For more information, see How to: Control Communication Across Zones.

By contrast, constraints on a logical server endpoint relate to the types of application endpoints that the logical server endpoint can host. For example, on an IIS Web server, you could prevent the WebSiteEndpoint from hosting either Web server or Web application endpoints using this type of constraint. For more information, see How to: Disallow Hosting Relationships.

See Also

Other Resources

Defining Communication Pathways Between Zones and Logical Servers