Redundant-Server Scenario

[marcpere]

My customer pretends to manage network, putting two CW (LMS & RWAN) in separate cities (North and South):

I have two ideias for managing scenarios:

A- One bundle in each city.

All devices have to sync with both bundles.

B - Onde bundle in each city and another bundle to aggregate info from both bundles.

North devices have to sync with North bundles.

South devices have to sync with South bundles.

Both bundles have to sync (RME, CM & DFM) with central bundle.

I'm open two other ideias!

tks, Marco Pereira

[marcpere]

A option with both server polling all devices

or

A option with Server North polling North devices and South Server polling South devices

or

B Option with same as above both with a third server sync with North and South Server and also doing polling to all devives. Setting polling much longer on the other two servers (South and North)

Any issues? Other solutions ? What I miss in each solution ? best approach in terms of network polling traffic ?

MPereira

[steve.busby]

What kind of connectivity exists between the north and south sites? How many devices in each site?

You may be able to get away with 1 bundle located at either the north or south site, depending on where the customer wants to monitor from.

"A option with Server North polling North devices and South Server polling South devices"

If they are insistent on two bundles then this is a good option, it will keep management polling to minimum and if connectivity between the sites goes down.

[marcpere]

Their are connected by an 10 Mb ATM connection.

I'm also with that opinion because they will manage (for now) a total of 500 devices. One bundle should be enough. Since they bought 2 bundles I was thinking of using the second as redundant server. For that I've doubts about if I should enable polling on the backup server or instead put a major polling interval. Also dividing I was limiting/eliminating the polling on that ATM connection.

Can I make diferent polling intervals to devices (by IP address range or other)?

MPereira

[steve.busby]

I'm not really sure how CW2K works in regards to redundant servers or if Cisco has design plans for it. Just my 2 cents, but I've never considered CW2K as "mission critical", definitely important, but not catastrophic if the server dies. There are parts of CW2K that are important, for instance the current device configuration and for that I have a laptop that I keep a copy of the configuration directory. I simply make the directory available offline and synchronize when I shutdown my laptop.

If you decide to use two servers, you can go into each server and change the poll times, collection times, etc., so they are different.

[john.sobrinho]

Considerations:

- do the sites really need to be managed different bundles ?

- bandwidth to do management centrally from one of the sites and have the otehr site as a hot stanby. If you do this ensure that the installs are identical meaning installations paths. I have succefully conducted DRP by creating scheduled backups locally on the server and have another job to automatically tape back up the Cw2k db back ups to a central tape server and restore the dbs from tape and restore cw2k db on the hot standby. Process is simple.

- how large are the sites ? do plan on running dfm ?

Have a look at Ciscoworks in large scale environemnts. They do go through some scenario consideration sfor multiple nms.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/wr2k/prodlit/ckspp_wp.htm

[marcpere]

- There are two management teams, one in each city. That and redundancy are the main reasons to have this solution

- That is nice but what about with DFM ?

- all net is about 600 devices and DFM will be enable on both but only one of them will do polling or one will poll half devices and another the other half ????

- I've seen that link. Tks.

regards

[john.sobrinho]

hello..

in that scenario if server A dies u will not be able to restore to server B. there is no restore options that will merge two databases ex. rme/campus/aclm etc...

it is not adviseable to have 2 active servers managing the same network.

in the scenario described i would think you will need two additional servers to back up site A and site B. Have devices in site A to point to primary server at site A and backup server in Site B, and vice versa and have the backup server just spinning with Ciscoworks installed but not configured, have your production servers documented as to part of your drp plan.

we have other correlation tools, so we do not use dfm, so a backup/resotre test on a test server would be adviseable since I can not comment in detail on DFM.

hope this helps.