Adding cold standby servers

You can add cold standby servers to serve as a backup server. You must start the secondary server or servers when the active server fails, and network traffic is routed to the secondary servers.

Before you begin

Make sure that the server is connected to a license server with available licenses.
Set up a cluster as described in Setting up high-availability clusters. You must have at least one cluster server running.

About this task

To set up a cold standby system, you install two or more servers on separate systems and connect both servers to the same database and network storage. Then, you configure DNS or a load balancer to distribute the traffic to secondary servers if the primary server fails. In either case, you must manually start the secondary servers after the primary server fails.

During failover, the secondary server reestablishes connections with all agents, runs recovery, and proceeds with any queued processes. IBM® UrbanCode™ Deploy has no automatic process for failover, but it can be managed by using your load balancer or DNS.

You can use cold standby servers with or without a load balancer. If you use a load balancer, instead of accessing the servers directly, users access the load balancer URL. To the users, that URL appears to host a single instance of the server with high capacity; the users are not aware of the multiple servers.

Procedure

Install the cold standby server:
1. Install the server as described in Installing the server in interactive mode with the following details:
  - When the installation program asks for database information, specify the database that the cluster servers are using.
  - If you are using a load balancer, when the installation program asks for the host name that users will access, specify the host name of the load balancer.
  - When the installation program asks if the server is part of a high-availability cluster, say yes.
  - When the installation program asks for the location of the application data, specify the same folder on the network storage that the other cluster servers are using.
  Note: Do not start the server.
2. On one of the existing cluster servers, create a network relay to the new server. See Creating network relays.
Optional: If you use DNS, configure the server routing path.
Optional: If you use a load balancer, configure the load balancer to route traffic to the cold standby server after failover.

Feedback