Cold / warm standby server: Best practices?

[swuehl]

Hi all,

a customer wants to implement a cold / warm standby QV server setting, i.e. a physical second server that jumps in in case the first server fails. The second should share the QV license of the first one, so QV services are disabled until the first servers fails.

- QV11SR1 EE, no publisher

- Win Server 2008 R2

- running in a perimeter network / DMZ, I'm not sure yet if user authentication can be done via AD

- few users only

My current approach would be to backup the essential application data from server1 say once a day /on reload of the first server and copy files over to the second server.

Is there any best practice to do something like this? Or at least some hints which pitfalls to consider upfront?

Any QV tools that might assist in this task?

I started rereading the upgrade and migration documentation to collect the set of essential data I need to backup, but for sure I will miss something.

One more thing:

- Client may want to use the shared objects feature extensively, is there anything to consider (in this server backup context) apart from copying the .shared files? If I can't use AD authentication, will copying user content be a major issue?

Thanks for any ideas, Tipps and Tricks

Stefan

[danielrozental · Accepted solution]

Stefan, hopefully someone else with actual experience on this will chip in. I agree with your approach, of course you would need to backup programdata\qliktech folder as well for tasks and configurations.

The only problem I found while moving services around is that I lost CAL assigment a couple of times, not sure related to what but you could also run powertools to backup and reassign licenses.

Not sure what you mean with not using AD, if you use the same authentication method in both servers then I don't see any problems with that.

You could also consider having all files in a network storage so there will be no need to copy files around.

[swuehl]

Daniel,

thanks a lot for your reply.

The only problem I found while moving services around is that I lost CAL assigment a couple of times, not sure related to what but you could also run powertools to backup and reassign licenses.

That's a good idea.

Not sure what you mean with not using AD, if you use the same authentication method in both servers then I don't see any problems with that.

The client doesn't have any user directory set up in that environment, so I need to take care for this myself.

As far as I see, QV11 won't allow to be installed on a domain controller, so maintaining a AD myself is excluded

upfront (and would be the most complex solution anyway).

Given the fact that I only need few users, from all the other directory options I think a custom directory would be most appropriate and also allow built in authentication.

I set this up yesterday and tried to copy the custom user data (DirectoryServiceConnector folder) to the other machine, which worked just fine.

Also transferring the server side objects worked out like I want it just by copying the documents folder.

So, I think I am almost done, just need to set up the regular synchronization task and do some testing.

Thanks again,

Stefan

[#4]

Hi Stefan,

I may have to do the same in my environment - I wonder could you share the list of steps/folders to copy etc. that you have come across so far?

many thanks!

Roz