UCCX Version 12.5 Finesse High Avaialbility

[nicholasacook]

I am trying to find ways to improve the UC envionrment of my company after I took over the system 4 years ago.  One topic that came across my thoughts was currently we are navigating directly to our UCCX servers to access Finesse (https://<UCCXpublisherserverFQDN>:8445/desktop).  We did setup HA access utilizing SRV records for Jabber earlier, and I was wondering if there is some method to allow HA access for FInesse in the case that the UCCX Publisher goes down and all of the agents are currently connected to Finesse with the current method of directly to the UCCX publisher server.  I have started looking and it looks like there is a way, but I couldn't really find how to configure it. 

[Vaijanath Sonvane]

Using load balancer is good option but as per design guide Unified CCX does not support load balancing of agent login. All agents must log in to the Master Node only. The enhancement in behavior is for failover support only.

Hopefully someone from Cisco Team can clarify if load balancer is supported or not and what are the best practices for Finesse login using single URL instead of using two in case of primary node failure. 

[david.macias]

How I read the documentation is that you can't balance the logins between both nodes, but you should still be able to use a load balancer to ensure agents are connecting to the active node.

david

[nicholasacook]

I did some testing and came up with the following observations.  As mentioned, natively there is no load balancing, so a load balancer could help with this (we do not have one in an area to be used for these servers).  So I could use 2 DNS records pointing to both servers as well, to be a soft load balancing, this is more theory than confirmed.

I did perform a failover testing while connected to UCCX primary server, and after I shutdown the primary server while signed into Finesse, I received a message stating the server was no longer available and that a failover was in attempt.  After about 1 minute, my browser did automatically failover to the secondary UCCX server.  So it does seem there is a live failover, but it will take approx 1 minute to failover.  So this has pretty much answered all of my questions/concerns and I hope this helps anyone else wondering how the failover process works if agents are currnetly signed into Finesse.  

[jim-j]

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@nicholasacook wrote:

So I could use 2 DNS records pointing to both servers as well, to be a soft load balancing, this is more theory than confirmed.

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I wouldn't recommend this for two reasons:

1. TAC recommends that all of your agents connect to the live/active server
2. In the case of a server down event then your DNS round-robin would be sending your agents to a down server half the time

One other observation... I've noticed (just by doing spot checks) that about 10% of my agents end up connected to my subscriber (secondary) server during  a normal "no issues" production day.  My agents claim they haven't bookmarked the subscriber, so I can only assume brief network blips are causing them to failover (most agents are working from home these days).  AFAIK this doesn't cause a problem, so I've quit caring about the ~10% of agents that connect to my subscriber.

[nicholasacook]

@jim-j 

After some testing and working on the system, I have verified that the system will automatically switch agents over to the subscriber server.  I was over complicating this in my head.