Geographical redundancy design for CUBE

[Doug Johnstone]

Hi guys,

I have made use of the CUBE RED licenses for many solutions over the years where CUBE redundancy has been required without stateful switchover and no HSRP and this design was well documented in the past.

I have been trying to find evidence that this design is still supported but getting nowhere. If its been deprecated then there is no evidence of that either.

Can someone from Cisco that is aware of the previous design please confirm if its still supported now. This may sound strange to ask but although documented, not all Cisco engineers were aware it was possible.

Thanks

Doug

[Vaijanath Sonvane]

Hi,
CUBE RED redundancy license applies to box-to-box redundancy in an Active/Standby deployment. You ideally need to have the Redundancy license only on ACTIVE CUBE box. You can not use single CUBE RED license on two geographically separate CUBE devices. For Geographic Redundancy, each CUBE box need to be licensed with Single-Use CUBE License.

Please see this Q&A thread: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/thread/125265

You can also check this new design guide for CUBE: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/voice/cube/configuration/cube-book.pdf

[Doug Johnstone]

Hi Vaijanath,

you've missed the point of my post.

At least as far back as 2017, CUBE RED licenses supported a few different design solutions. See attached document which was taken from a Cisco document, which is now, no longer available online. If you look on CUBE design forums, you will, however, find many references to it.

Redundancy did not always apply to box-to-box redundancy in an Active/Standby deployment and as i said i used the geographical redundancy design; as it was known, lots of times in CUBE deployments.

Many customers have no HSRP capability between multiple sites and also use active/active to fit their requirements. The older geographic redundancy design allowed you to upload CUBE RED licenses to both CUBE's knowing that if one of the active CUBE's failed, the other CUBE was capable of supporting the full license count.

Not having to purchase additional licenses that, in most cases, you didnt use, made it a good commercial design too.

At some point over the years Cisco decided to remove this design from the documentation, without making any noise about it and i would just like to why, and if it still supported as there is a lot of customers out there with this type of solution in place. There is also no reason why it wont work and the only justification i can see for removing it, is a commercial one.

It would be nice if someone from Cisco, that was around a few years ago and knew this solution would provide an answer to this.

Many thanks

Doug

[Vaijanath Sonvane]

I found old Cisco Live document about what you are referring to (https://www.ciscolive.com/c/dam/r/ciscolive/us/docs/2017/pdf/LTRCOL-2310.pdf) and now I understand what you are saying. I looked at the newer version of LTRCOL-2310 on Cisco Live but the Customer Deployment Scenarios are no longer included in it. As per new configuration guide, CUBE supports three types of high availability (HA) options but they have mentioned only two options: HSRP and RG. There is no mention of third option and also there is no mention of Local/Geographic Redundancy in entire guide for ASR/4K . Either Cisco forgot to include third option in configuration guide or they no longer support it. I would recommend to open a case with Cisco PDI helpdesk. 

[Doug Johnstone]

Well done in finding the information on CUBE. I had looked previously for some time to find the old documentation that still showed the geographic redundancy design but wasn't able.

I think the third type of redundancy they are referring to is inbox redundancy and are referring to ASRs directly with that one.

Opening a case with PDI helpdesk may help, after having to discuss the solution several times before actually having someone involved that understands the question and the solution, but that wont help identify this solution for everyone else.

For some reason Cisco have removed this design, accidentally hopefully, but i need Cisco to answer that one and confirm the design is still supported. Like i said previously, there are a lot of solutions out there using this design, so we need to know if its still supported.