ACS 5.2 and Vmware features

[Kelvin Willacey]

Hi,

Can anyone confirm if ACS 5.2 on vmware supports HA or fault tolerance. I am thinking I won't need multiple instances of ACS and do replication if it is able to take advantage of vmware high availability features. Any input would be appreciated, thanks.

[Tarik Admani]

Hello,

As far as ACS 5.x, and other acs products, the high availablity is more a of an active/active scenario, meaning that there is no service interface or anything shared to determine the link state if one acs is up and if the other is down. It is based on the NAS itself to determine when an appliance (radius or tacacs server) is marked dead by dead criteria.

The purpose of deploying multiple instances of ACS is for HA incase on box goes down you can setup replication partners and have an identical box at another site running active so if the primary box does go down it will be ready to perform authentication.

As far has vmware's high availabilty features which is a great feature, depending on the size of the enterprise customer usually deploy multiple instances of ACS for different territories or sites based on number of clients that maybe hitting the acs at any given time.

Let me know if this helps!

Tarik Admani

[Kelvin Willacey]

Thanks for the response. So are you saying that the ACS VM would be able to take advantage of the Vmware features? I understand all you have said but at the DC we typically deploy more than one device for high availability and one at the DR. So I was thinking since ACS is on a VM I can only deploy one at the DC and have it take advantage of Vmware high availability features and deploy another at the DR and have replication between those two, instead of deploying two at the DC and one at the DR like we would typically do.

[eoinwhite]

Hi Tarik,

I'm also very interested in this question. I've raised it with Cisco before but have never got a clear answer.

Are we saying the we can leverage VmWare's high availablity features to achive high availabilty without any licensing gotchas on the ACS?

What about for the physical appliance is there any plans to release high avilabilty in version 5.3?

Regards,

Eoin.

[jason.edelman]

Can Cisco please confirm this?  Is VMWare HA officially supported for ACS 5.2?

Thanks,
Jason

[camejia]

Hello Jason,

ACS 5.x does not support VM HA Features. It does not support VMTools either.

http://tools.cisco.com/Support/BugToolKit/search/getBugDetails.do?method=fetchBugDetails&bugId=CSCtg50048

Add support for VMWare Tools to ACS 5

Symptom:VMWare Tools support is not present on ACS 5.Conditions:This affects ACS 5.Workaround:None

NOTE: there is no enhancement request for VM HA Features yet. Sharing the request with a Cisco Account Manager would be the best approach at this point.

Hope this clarifies it.

Regards