The Cisco Prime Infrastructure High Availability (HA) implementation allows for up to two primary Cisco Prime Infrastructure systems to failover to one secondary (backup) Cisco Prime Infrastructure system.
Cisco Prime Infrastructure HA can also be deployed with geographic separation of the primary and secondary servers. This type of deployment is also known as Disaster Recovery (DR), or Geographic Redundancy. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when deploying Cisco Prime Infrastructure in this mode:
- The primary and secondary server can be a mix of a physical and a virtual appliance.
- The size of the secondary server must be larger than or equal to that of the primary server
- Must be running the same version of Cisco Prime Infrastructure on both the primary and secondary Cisco Prime Infrastructure servers.
- Only one Cisco Prime Infrastructure server license needs to be purchased. There is no need to purchase a license for the secondary Cisco Prime Infrastructure server. The secondary server will use the license from the primary when a failover occurs.
• Bandwidth: Recommendation is to have 10 Mbps or more; however, we have seen HA used on DSL links as well. Each deployment is unique, so it's better to test out the failover scenario just as a sanity check.
• Latency: There is a continuous heartbeat (every 5 seconds) that happens between the primary and secondary Cisco Prime Infrastructure servers. Latency cannot be higher than this heartbeat interval; otherwise the primary server is deemed as a failure by the secondary server.