SharePoint 2010 - Custom service application, global deployment, service runs on single server only?

After almost a week of research and dealing with Microsoft support, I thought I'd ask here, as I feel I am still quite far from an answer and wouldn't want to spend much longer trying to solve this issue.

I have created a custom SharePoint 2010 service application based on all of the examples and documentation available on the net.

My environment is a two-server farm, where server1 is my Central Administration and database host (as well as a plethora of other SharePoint services) and server2 has an identical feature list except that I have gone ahead and disabled all services. My idea for now is to use server2 exclusively as my "custom service" server. This might change in the future once I devise the best topology for our farm, but for testing purposes it works best to differentiate between servers like this.

So I have my custom service application all coded up in Visual Studio 2010 and I am able to successfully perform a global deployment, such that the binaries from my solution are added to the assembly and hive folders of both servers. I have verified this deployment by looking at the specific solution properties under Solution Management and also by looking at the underlying logs.

I then go ahead and activate the feature under Manage Farm Features.

At this point, while I haven't yet created the service application or its proxy, the service shows up as a "Stopped" service on server1 (which is also the server where Visual Studio is running locally) but not on server2. So I create a new service application under "Manage Service Applications" and that starts the service, and everything seems to be fine except for the fact that server2 simply does not appear to have this service anywhere.

So I am wondering, what exactly do I need to do to allow for this service to run on both servers? Ultimately I will be stopping it on server1 and using the service instance on server2 as the only instance in the farm, but for that to happen I need to be able to get it to show up on server2.

I hope that made sense, I tried to make it as clear as possible, but please do let me know if anyth开发者_Python百科ing is still not clear and I will do my best to explain things differently.

From what I have read, this is perfectly possible, to have instances of the same service running across the various application servers in a SharePoint farm... however I simply cannot seem to get it to work!

Any help with this would be tremendously appreciated.

Cheers.

It appears as though with all global deployments of custom "service application" solutions, SharePoint 2010 automatically creates the service instances upon deployment, before anything else. This can be verified by looking at the list of services for each of the servers in the farm. It is really quite odd, because it is doing this now which it wasn't before, so after all there may well not be a need to create the service instances manually as part of the post-deployment, provisioning phase. Does anybody know where exactly SharePoint 2010 gets the directive from to do this? I am curious to find out how it all is happening under the covers!