WCS Failover - how does it work?

[phaon.reid]

We have two live WCS servers for our Northern and Southern Wireless estates, and have recently installed a third WCS (on a VMWare Platform) as a HA backup to the live servers.

HA registration appears to have completed correctly, and HA Status shows the secondary WCS IP, Failover Type Automatic, and  Current State as Primary Active.  So far so good.

We cannot access the Web GUI of the standby WCS - we just get a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable message from Apache.  Is this normal behaviour when the standby device is not active?

When we fail one of the primaries, should the secondary magically burst into life, should its GUI then become available via its IP address, and should it then become usable to manage our wireless devices?  The first time we tried doing this, nothing seemed to happen, and the standby remained inaccessible.

Any advice from someone who has actually used multiple WCS units in failover mode would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Surendra BG]

Hi Phaon,

Here is what happens when one of the primary servers goes down (crash, hardware issue):

Fist to say One physical secondary WCS can back many primary WCS.

1-      the health monitor on the secondary WCS detects that failure

2-      If automatic failover has been enabled, secondary WCS instance is started immediately and uses the corresponding database of the primary. If automatic failover is disabled, an email is sent to the administrator asking if they want to manually start failover.

3-      After a successful failover, the client should point to the newly activated WCS (the secondary WCS). The secondary WCS updates all controllers with its own address as the trap destination.

Important note: The redirecting of web traffic to the secondary WCS does not occur automatically. You must use your infrastructure tools to properly configure this redirection

Please take a look at the following prerequisites and make sure they are met:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/wcs/7.0/configuration/guide/7_0admin.html#wp1096458

also make sure HA was configured properly according to the documentation

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/wcs/7.0/configuration/guide/7_0admin.html#wp1098169

lemme know if this answered your question..

Regards
Surendra
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[phaon.reid]

Hi Surendra

Thanks, yes, that's what the config guide says.

After further experimentation I have come to the conclusion that the GUI of the secondary WCS is NOT accessible while it is in standby mode, and a non-live secondary is thus only accessible using the Health Monitor.

The secondary's Health Monitor shows "secondary syncing" with both our primaries, failover type = automatic and action=none.  I assume that this is all as it should be.

I'm hoping that that when we fail one of the primaries we will then be able to access the GUI, log in to the now-active secondary and use it to manage our Wireless devices.  We have scheduled a test to verify this.

Phaon

[sridhkri]

Hi,

You can try this below steps, it will work.

1. Installed primary and secondary with same version.

2. Sync up both machine. ( I had from your messge no issue for sync up).

3. After sync up you access the secondary machine as the below URL

http// :8082

4. You will get the updates for successful registered.

5. when the primary server incase if it faling or down, then the secondary WCS become in active. ( Failover type when you choose as "automatic") it will be done automatically on the failover. ( this you have to keep see the messge in the secondary URL:8082.

6. Then try secondary IP and access the WCS.

7. If the primary up and running, You have to click fallback on the URL and then primary will be an active and secondary will be an failover.

Any clarification read the User guide.

Thanks and Regards

Sridharank