Summary
The SMS can be configured to operate in an active-passive, high availability (HA) cluster, increasing availability of the SMS in case an unexpected event causes the primary SMS to fail or become inaccessible. The SMS HA cluster consists of two nodes, one designated as the primary SMS, the other designated as the secondary SMS. Under normal operation, the state of the primary SMS is Active, and the state of the secondary SMS is Passive, unless the primary SMS becomes unavailable. When the primary SMS is unavailable, the state of the secondary SMS changes to Active. During initial HA configuration, the SMS cluster performs a synchronization of the database from the active SMS to the passive SMS. To keep the passive SMS current, the active SMS replicates critical SMS data to the passive SMS, including database and SMS configuration.
Details
A. Yes, you can configure the SMS server for High Availability (HA) while the servers are located in different geographic locations. The main issue with this configuration would be maintaining the link between both SMS's and the database replication. So as long as you have sufficient bandwidth, link reliability and an acceptable delay (less than 300ms) the configuration will work.
Replication bandwidth requirements
The SMS has replication bandwidth requirements for heartbeat, Digital Vaccine (DV) and upgrade package download, and event traffic.
- Less than 10 Kb/s bandwidth is required for heartbeat and system usage/administration operations, such as policy management.
- A minimum of 1 Mb/s bandwidth is recommended for DV and upgrade package download. These operations consume as much bandwidth as is available between the two systems, but headroom of about 1 Mb/s keeps the two systems reasonably synchronized.
- Event traffic requires approximately 1.5 Mb/s per 1,000 events/second.
