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Solarwinds High availability configuration

Dear Team,

We want to configure Solarwinds in High Availability mode with different subnet i.e., primary server will be in one location lets say in India and secondary server will be in another location lets say USA. This will act as HA and also as DR in case of any issue on primary location. But customer doesn't want to provide AD permission issue for configuring this in multi subnet mode. Hence is there any other way we can achieve this configuration. Kindly suggest. Thanks in advance.

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Accepted answers

tony.johnson

Hello,

When you state "AD permission issue" I understand you are referring to the required DNS Permissions and steps to set up a High Availability Pool and access Microsoft DNS?

If so the following article may help understand how to Grant access to a non-administrator account for DNS Management Success Center

Note that there’s no requirement to use a Virtual hostname with HA. It’s provided only as a convenience. Many customers opt instead to use a load balancer.

While rare, those who do encounter similar security concerns when implementing HA sometimes create a separate DNS zone and run the DNS services on the Orion server for that zone. Others still, have gone so far as to utilize Route53, Cloudflare, etc. to keep their virtual DNS hostname name completely separate from the rest of their name services infrastructure. Microsoft however, does not provide such capabilities natively, though BIND does.

All comments

Hi All,

Can someone update on this. Thanks in advance.

Best Regards

Bharath

tony.johnson

Hello,

When you state "AD permission issue" I understand you are referring to the required DNS Permissions and steps to set up a High Availability Pool and access Microsoft DNS?

If so the following article may help understand how to Grant access to a non-administrator account for DNS Management Success Center

Note that there’s no requirement to use a Virtual hostname with HA. It’s provided only as a convenience. Many customers opt instead to use a load balancer.

Hi Tony,

Thank you very much for sharing the info. We tried and tested the option mentioned in the link, but it didn't work. Do you have any article or link from Solarwinds on how to configure using load balancer. Because I have never configured any application using LB. In our environment we have Citrix NetScaler LB.

Thanks again.

Regards

tony.johnson

As we dont have any official documentation for configuration of 3rd party products this may help SolarWinds High Availability - HA - In a WAN Environment!!!

aLTeReGo

The following KB from Citrix appears to walk you through the process.

Citrix NetScaler - Simple HTTP Site Load Balancing

Thanks aLTeReGo...document is really helpful.

Hi Tony,

Just wanted to check one thing here, initially we are installing Solarwinds application on primary server and we select scalability option to install the Solarwinds application on secondary server. Now we don't have HA configured using either DNS or BIND method. If we are going to use net scaler load balancer here, its just going to check the active member and send the traffic to it. If its not available it send the traffic to secondary server.

But my doubt is how the Solarwinds services on secondary server gets initiated if primary (active) is down and netscaler load balancer is redirecting the traffic to secondary?

Do we need to start the Solarwinds services on secondary server (passive) manually?

Do we need to do any configuration on netscaler load balancer to initiate Solarwinds services to start if primary or active server is down?

I am really having doubts how the application is going to start and how load balancer is going to work here. I really appreciate if you could clarify my doubts. Thanks in advance.

Hi aLTeReGo,

But my doubt is how the Solarwinds services on secondary server gets initiated if primary (active) is down and netscaler load balancer is redirecting the traffic to secondary?

Do we need to start the Solarwinds services on secondary server (passive) manually?

Do we need to do any configuration on netscaler load balancer to initiate Solarwinds services to start if primary or active server is down?

I am really having doubts how the application is going to start and how load balancer is going to work here. I really appreciate if you could clarify my doubts. Thanks in advance.

aLTeReGo

bharath08 wrote:
Do we need to start the Solarwinds services on secondary server (passive) manually?

Any failure of the 'Active' member will first attempt local recovery. If local recovery fails or is not possible, a failover occurs. This can be a takeover event from the passive member, where the passive member takes over the 'Active' role from the other member of the pool, or a handoff event where the 'Active' member surrenders control over to the other member of the pool. Regardless of how the 'Active' member responsibility was transferred, the process is completely automatic. You can always force a failover event to occur through the Orion Web Interface if you so desire. Alternatively, you can also trigger a failover event to occur as an alert action through the Alert Manager, or programmatically through the Orion SDK. Again, neither of those are a requirement since Orion HA will handle the failover automatically in the event of an issue.

Do we need to do any configuration on netscaler load balancer to initiate Solarwinds services to start if primary or active server is down?

As part of configuring the vserver in the NetScaler you will also configure monitors. These monitors probe the Orion website on both Active and Passive members to determine where to route the traffic. If Server 'A' is the Active member of the pool, the load balancer will know because it is the only pool member properly accepting web requests. When Server 'A' fails over to Server 'B', the NetScaler monitors will mark 'Server A' as being 'down' and route all traffic to Server 'B'.

Note that if both Primary and Secondary Orion servers are in the same subnet, there's no need to use a Virtual Hostname or a load balancer. When Orion High Availability is configured in a same-subnet configuration a VIP (Virtual IP address) is used which ensures that traffic going to Orion is directed to the active member. A load balancer is typically only used in a multi-subnet configuration as an alternative to a virtual hostname, or in instances where customers have a number of Additional Web Servers they want to load balance user traffic across.

jgrobinette050

I just posted some HA questions in NPM forum. If you don't see them let me know.