PLEASE Provide Input: Field Utilization of System Manager High Availability

[micwood]

System Manager Product Team isseeking help with the following questions related to deployment and utilization of the System Manager High Availability (SMGR-HA) feature by our Clients.

1. If you are a Partner or Service Provider, how often do you see System Manager in a High Availability configuration being deployed in the field (Always, Frequently, Rarely)?

2. If you are an End-User Customer maintaining an Avaya Aura solution with SMGR, do you deploy SMGR in a High Availability configuration

3. Do you have any comments on the business or positioning implications of Avaya Aura, if the System Manager offer did not include a High Availability option (note: System Manager Geographic Redundancy would remain available)?

Feature descriptions for SMGR High Availability and Geographic Redundancy are listed below.

Your feedback can be entered in this thread or forwarded to via email to: [email protected]
Thanks in advance for your response:

System Manager High Availability feature summary:

System Manager leverages Avaya’s System Platform High Availability mechanism to maintain a standby System Manager server. This is accomplished by System Platform continuously mirroring all disk data from the active to standby server. The Two System Manager must be within 100 meters of each other.Automatic activation of the standby System Manager in the event the active server has an outage (6 minute activation period)


System Manager Geographic Redundancy feature summary:


System Manager (SMGR) 6.3.x Geographic Redundancy service replicates Avaya Aura element support for two geographically distant SMGR sites (separate subnets, across a WAN) so that SMGR management services can be switched from one site to another, in case of the catastrophic failure of one of sites or servers. The SMGR GR sites are set up in pairs, with each site in a SMGR Standalone or SMGR High-Availability (HA) configuration. One member of the site pair is designated the Primary SMGR Server; the other is designated as the Secondary SMGR Server.

[mlombardi1]

I have installed several HA SMGRs and it does prove useful, especially since SMGR is hardly reliable. The web interface breaks constantly and requires rebooting, but sometimes even that does not solve it.

[rparro]

Not really had a huge amount of experience with HA SMGR as we usually use the MES based SMGR (occasionally on HA MES which seems to work pretty well).

90% of our non-MES SMGRs are now going in as VMware vApps which does not support the HA-SMGR, I assume due to the possibility of using the underlying VMware redundancy options.

Rob

[disaiam]

SMGR High Availability on VMware

Thank you for the two responses to date. There have been over 800 views of this post on two Avaya Support Forums and we kindly request that more viewers take a moment to respond.

A couple of comments on the two responses.

As you mentioned (rparro), many System Manager customers are moving to a VMware based environment. For System Manager we are seeing approximately a 50-50 split between System Manager on System Platform and System Manager on VMware. System Manager running in the VMware Virtualization Environment can use VMware High Availability. For application level High Availability, System Manager has Geographic Redundancy (SMGR-GR) which was introduced n SMGR 6.3.0 (Dec 2012 GA). SMGR-GR is available in both VMware and System Platform based environments.

As for the slow SMGR response, I'd like to suggest running the latest version of SMGR which is 6.3.8 (June 2, 2014 GA). If there are issues, we should have a ticket open with service and we can have the issue reviewed by our design support team.

[evertw]

Rarely

We use the SMGR HA Rarely. The Geo is better, but also used Rarely. If the HA disappears in R7 we are not going to miss it.

[sfrank]

We use Geo Redundancy. It works but we never had to fail over. One thing i don't like is how replication doesn't reestablish when it goes down. We have to manually start it up again each time.

[ricka6]

How About 50%

Between the place I last worked where we did use the HA SMGR and my new job where it's a single standalone SMGR it's a 50% implementation rate. Depending upon how stable this standalone runs I might just push for an HA implementation here. I know at the last place we did have to reboot the system more than just occasionally and it being HA certainly did help.

[hurdk]

I have been involved in a number of implementations of SMGR from 6-7 and have only seen 1 system that was HA. I have seen mostly certificate issues when I do see a problem or in some cases have to remove elements and re add them because of issues.

[mahajc]

Rarely

We use the SMGR HA Very Rarely and even geo HA rarely.