Solved: CUP 8: no high availability

Yorick Petey · ‎08-03-2010

Hi,

I recently upgraded from CUP 7.0 to Presence 8.0 (with CUPC 8). I have 2 nodes in a single cluster. In presence 7.0, there is automatic failover to the backup node when the primary node is down.

Now I am very surprised to discover in the release notes of CUP8.0 that the High Availability is no more supported!

"If you deploy the active/standby user assignment model in Cisco Unified Presence Release 7.0(x), and you upgrade to Cisco Unified Presence Release 8.0(x), where the active/standby model no longer supports failover, we recommend that you redistribute (rebalance) your users across the cluster. "

(Extract from Deployment Guide 8.0)

It is a shame to release a major version losing an important feature like that! How can we explain to customers that they bought a cluster to have redundancy but they don't?

Does anyone got the information about the roadmap when this feature will be reimplemented?

Thank you.

Yorick

PS: CUPC8+CSF takes >200MB of the workstations RAM! It's huge!

htluo · ‎08-03-2010

First of all, you should ask yourself "Why do I (or my clients) want to upgrade to CUPS 8 if CUPS 7 was working perfectly?".

Cisco build different software "trains" in parallel. For example: they build CUCM 7 and CUCM 8 in parallel. So it's pretty normal that CUCM 7.1.5 comes out after CUCM 8.0.1. Just like Exchange 2007 SP3 comes out after Exchange 2010 was released.

Which version is better? Shouldn't the "latest" be the "greatest"? It depends.

Usually, a new "major version" was released because the architecture was changed dramatically (because the requirement of new features). Since different' "major versions" were being developed in parallel, it's very difficult (sometimes impossible) to synchronize all the features and bug fixes to each other. For a customer that was satisfied with the features of 7.x, version 7.1.5 would be the best version. For customers that would like the try the features on 8.x, they might have to bear the bugs in 8.0.1 (which might have already been fixed in 7.1.5).

Back to CUPS. The "new feature" of 8.0 is the incorporation of "Jabber" (XMPP). XMPP is supposed to be the next standard protocol for presence and instant message and being used by many big names such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. Since Jabber was acquired by Cisco, it takes time to "merge" into CUPS. That's why the first release didn't have HA. More specifically, didn't have HA on XMPP. HA support is scheduled in CUPS 8.5, which is due the end of this year.

Someone might argue, that Cisco could have waited for HA before release the 8.x version. Well, that's debatable, because some customers out there want XMPP so badly that they don't care HA at all.

Same for the CSF architecture. It's currently developled with Java, so memory and CPU usage won't be optimum (well-known issue of Java). Cisco is building C++ version which would significantly improve both memory and CPU.

Michael

http://htluo.blogspot.com

View solution in original post

htluo · ‎08-03-2010

First of all, you should ask yourself "Why do I (or my clients) want to upgrade to CUPS 8 if CUPS 7 was working perfectly?".

Cisco build different software "trains" in parallel. For example: they build CUCM 7 and CUCM 8 in parallel. So it's pretty normal that CUCM 7.1.5 comes out after CUCM 8.0.1. Just like Exchange 2007 SP3 comes out after Exchange 2010 was released.

Which version is better? Shouldn't the "latest" be the "greatest"? It depends.

Usually, a new "major version" was released because the architecture was changed dramatically (because the requirement of new features). Since different' "major versions" were being developed in parallel, it's very difficult (sometimes impossible) to synchronize all the features and bug fixes to each other. For a customer that was satisfied with the features of 7.x, version 7.1.5 would be the best version. For customers that would like the try the features on 8.x, they might have to bear the bugs in 8.0.1 (which might have already been fixed in 7.1.5).

Back to CUPS. The "new feature" of 8.0 is the incorporation of "Jabber" (XMPP). XMPP is supposed to be the next standard protocol for presence and instant message and being used by many big names such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. Since Jabber was acquired by Cisco, it takes time to "merge" into CUPS. That's why the first release didn't have HA. More specifically, didn't have HA on XMPP. HA support is scheduled in CUPS 8.5, which is due the end of this year.

Someone might argue, that Cisco could have waited for HA before release the 8.x version. Well, that's debatable, because some customers out there want XMPP so badly that they don't care HA at all.

Same for the CSF architecture. It's currently developled with Java, so memory and CPU usage won't be optimum (well-known issue of Java). Cisco is building C++ version which would significantly improve both memory and CPU.

Michael

http://htluo.blogspot.com

Yorick Petey · ‎08-03-2010

Last but not least: do you know if CUPC 7.1 still supports failover when it is connected to CUP 8? (I have 40 users connected right now so it is difficult for me to test).

By the way, I bought your last book (CUP 7.x & 8.x), thanks again for that, Presence guru.

Yorick

htluo · ‎08-03-2010

You may still have users on two different servers. But if one of them failed, you'll have to manually re-assign the user to another server from CUPS Admin. And the client need to change the logon server to a different server.

This is a manual failover, not "high availability" (which is automatic).

Michael

ibrahimsiddiqui · ‎10-11-2010

At this moment which version should we have to propose to the customer CUP 8.0 or CUP 7.0 for the redundancy option.

Let say we can propose CUP 8.0 with two server with UCSS and once 8.5 is out we will upgrade to 8.5 on the same hardware, is this a correct strategy?

Regards

Ibrahim Javed

Yorick Petey · ‎10-11-2010

If you absolutely need high availability, the only option is to go to CUP 7, pub+sub.

As I knew, CUP 8.5 should bring back redundancy, and was roadmapped for January, I don't know if these two statements are still correct, Michael?

So yes, you could deploy CUP 7 with UCSS to upgrade to 8.5 as soon as it will be released. The bad point is that CUPC 7.1 and CUPC 8 are very different in many aspects. You will deploy version 7.1, package the software and deploy it on all workstations, train the users with this version and habits, to finally do a full new deployment several months later with a radical change for users (GUI, outlook toolbar, click to call feature, VTA...). That's why we choose to start new projects with version 8.0, because 7.1 is already dead.

I continue to think that Cisco made a mistake with this version 8.0 without the high availability feature. This is a major problem for big deployments.

Good luck.

Yorick

Yorick Petey · ‎08-03-2010

Hi Michael,

Thank you for your answer and your personal opinion which is always interesting.

On the technical point of view I totally understand that the development and release trains are concurrent and this explains the differences between the versions. It is not a criticism against the developers who I am sure are doing their best to release versions as fast as they can.

And this is maybe the problem. I don't want to detail my opinion here but sometime it's hard to understand Cisco strategy regarding their big customer.

It is a new project, not in production yet, and CUPC 7 is disappointing. CUPC 8 was the hope to find a new modern GUI (we have to fight against OCS), to merge CUPC+CUVA+Click-to-call in a single client, to add new features like HD video, chat rooms, archiving, better integration into Windows environment... All these points push to CUPC 8 which is promoted by cisco since several months.

Deploying CUPC 7 + c2c, for more than 1000 users and then CUPC 8 several months later would be negative.

Anyway, thank you for your help.

Best regards,

Yorick