Managing Active/Passive Cluseter (Best Practices)

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1

Hi,
We have aour DEV,QA,PROD environment in active/passive cluster.
The problem we are havin is whenever we do any package migration
or apply any fixes we need to do a failover and the do that task
again.
Is there any way through which we can just do all the stuff on active
BOX and gets replicated on another box.

Thanks,
Amit.

2

I don’t know if this is a best practice, but it is working for us. I install the package on the active node using the IS Admin. Then I delete the directory for that package on the inactive node. The directory is /IntegrationServer/packages/. Then I copy that folder from the active box to the inactive box. This seems to work fine for packages. There are a few things that require a failover such as scheduling a service and updating a mainframe configuration. I have not been able to find a file that can be copied for these items.

It seems as though you have it a little better than us. We only have our production environment in this configuration. When the active/passive configuration causes problems, we don’t see it until production.

Steve

3

Steve: Has that process caused any issues for you? I ask because an active package, with potentially active services, is basically being disabled and reenabled on the fly. This would cause any processes that are using those services to fail. Seems to me that a failover process is needed–or at least just disabling listeners so nothing will get activated while the update is being done.

4

Have you thought about using a shared disk array?. Have only one server mounted to the shared mount point at a time. The shared mount point will contain your packages, config, document store, repository if local, audit, etc… During failover your primary server will unmount the disk array and your secondary will mount it. No replication needed.

We use Veritas Server Cluster to managed this on our solaris boxes. Works very well.

5

I don’t think any active services are disabled.

6

We use a shared disk for the broker, but I was not aware that is was possible with the IS. I will definitely look into this. Has any one done this on a Windows 2000 Advanced Server?

Thanks,
Steve

7

Steve: I was referring to what happens when you said “I install the package on the active node using the IS Admin.” I believe this action disables the package so the files can be written to disk and the package reloaded (and startup services run).

8

Reamon:This is an issue for a single IS.