CA or DA Hardware Load Balancing

[Fremont]

Hi

Does anyone know whether hardware load balancers (F5 Big-IP for example) are supported with multiple CA or multiple DA servers as a way to do load-balancing and High Availability at the same time?  The Install Guides for both products mention Windows Network Load Balancing as the only option, but I'm wondering if there are other options available.

For example, if we install 2 CA servers and configure them both to use the same Configuration and Customer databases (by creating the DBs while configuring the first server and choosing "use existing DB" while configuring the second server), could we use F5 or even a simple DNS round-robin to distribute the load?  I know you can configure the CA server names both in the AcceleratorClient.Exe.Config file as well as the StartupPreferences.xml files but wondering if anyone has tested such a scenario. 

Thanks,

Fremont

[Alok_Dave · Accepted solution]

Hello Fremont,

As far as my understanding goes, Windows Network Load Balancing is the only supported option with Compliance Accelerator and Discovery Accelerator.

IMO, scenario of connecting one Customer Database with two or more servers is going to cause unpredictive failures. It is not supported and haven't been tested/used by anyone in the field.

Also it will not really help you in load balancing, since earch Customer DB( CA/DA ) is always linked on with on server at a time, this also means that all the usual operations of CA/DA ( i.e. Searching / Review / Production ) will be performed by that server. 

Current architecture of the product doesn't allow you scale the CA/DA Customer by distributing load on multiple servers.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Alok 

[Fremont]

Thanks Alok. This helps.

Is there any documentation on how to set up CA or DA in a Windows Network Load Balanced cluster? The Install guides for both products only have half a page each and all they mention is "install NLB and then insall the product on each node". Is that all? I haven't tested it yet, but something tells me there's gotta be more details involved,

For example: creating the config and customer DBs also creates the IIS virtual directories. Will they be created automatically on BOTH nodes or do we have to do some manual work?

Thanks,

[Alok_Dave]

Hello There,

They are some exclusive documents written to cover the configuration and best practises details for Discovery Accelerator. I am assuming that you are running on either v8 or v9 of the product.

1) DA 9 Best Practices Guide

    http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=DOC2819

2) DA 8 Best Practises Guide

   http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH71042

I think you will be able to spot the details your require about load balancing.

Hope this helps.