The Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) provides two types of high availability (HA) options on the Cisco Aggregation Services Router (ASR1000) platform:
- Box-to-box redundancy
- Inbox Redundancy
The CUBE HA implementation on the ASR Platforms supports full stateful failover for active SIP-SIP calls. This means both media and session signaling information is preserved after switchover.
This capability is supported as of Cisco IOS XE Release 3.2
Box-to-Box Redundancy
Box-to-box redundancy uses the Redundancy Group (RG) Infrastructure to form an Active/Standby pair of routers. The Active/Standby pair share the same virtual IP address (VIP) and continually exchange status messages. CUBE session information is check-pointed across the Active/Standby pair of routers enabling the Standby router to take over immediately all CUBE call processing responsibilities if the Active router should go out of service for planned or unplanned reasons.
This redundancy option is supported on the ASR 1001/1002/1004 platforms.
Inbox Redundancy
Inbox redundancy mechanism provides redundancy within the same box. Some models of the ASR offers hardware redundancy within the box and some offers software redundancy. This section discusses the various aspects for Inbox Redundancy on the Cisco ASR1000 platforms.
- Hardware redundancy – supports stateful failover from an active Enhanced Services Processor to a standby and from an active Route Processor to a standby on the same box. Cisco ASR1006 supports this type of failover
- Software redundancy – supports stateful failover from an active IOS process to a standby process, both running on the same Route processor. This is different than the platforms running Cisco IOS like the ISR-G2s where only 1 process can run on the operating system. Cisco ASR1001/1002/1004 supports this type of failover.
This application note will provide detailed information on how to set up CUBE on the ASR platform for the Box-to-box redundancy option.
