FAST HA SOLUTION

joe.favia · ‎03-06-2009

Hi,

We've been toying with an idea for a High Availability solution for CSMARS. Should I remove the HDs from a 110 model in production to another idle 110 model (a "backup" machine), in order to bring over my entire database and configuration, would the backup model be able to startup and work with the up-to-date DB or would I run into problems? I think there could be some issues with my license, but I'm not sure about anything else. Anyone have an ideas? Thanks, Joe

tbyrnes · ‎05-18-2009

I can tell you that we are running 6.0.3 on a 200, and we recently had a NIC failure. We didn't have a good config backup so when the replacement appliance arrived we did just that. We swapped the drives from the failing appliance to the new appliance. You are correct that you will have license issues, but TAC should be able to supply a new license fairly quickly. I believe it's tied to the hardware address for eth0 so TAC just asked me for an ifconfig output and gave me the new license.

We did just do it this morning, but all early indications suggest that it was successful, and we have completely recovered all data and configs.

mhellman · ‎05-18-2009

We've done this before as well, on a 100e I believe. It's been a while, but I believe it worked just fine and we just had to update the license.

joe.favia · ‎06-03-2009

I tried it on our appliance but the machine would not come back up. The operating system would not boot. I had made a TAC request but they said that the solution is not officially supported, but it could work depending on the RAID controller. Apparently some info is stored on it. I was told that the result of the disk swap operation were not predictable and that it could lead to a major problem requiring re-imaging of the appliance. I had an updated backup on NFS though and decided to try. Unfortunately it didn't work but when I put the original disks back in the appliance was back on its feet without any data loss.

Regards, Joe

mhellman · ‎06-03-2009

good to know.