High availability (HA) is often associated with fault-tolerant systems, meaning a system can continue to operate in the presence of a component failure or a planned shutdown. A single component failure in a fault-tolerant system will not cause a system interruption because the alternate component will take over the task transparently. With Arcserve Backup central management the need for high availability becomes more important to provide 24x7 data protection, especially for the primary server, which plays a key role as the centralized control center for the Arcserve Backup domain.
Prior to performing cluster-aware installation of a Arcserve Backup server, you should consider the following:
Which Arcserve Backup server(s) will be deployed as cluster-aware?
Usually in a central management environment, the Arcserve Backup primary server is considered a better candidate to protect by cluster to achieve HA capability. However, clustered member servers are also supported.
Note: The setup program for cluster machines does not support remote installation of the Arcserve Backup base product or the Arcserve Backup agents. This remote install limitation for the Arcserve Backup agents (for example, the Agent for Microsoft SQL Server and the Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server) only applies if you use a virtual host. Remote installation of Arcserve Backup agents using the physical hosts of clusters is supported.
Which cluster nodes will be deployed as a Arcserve Backup HA server?
A cluster system may include several cluster nodes. In a cluster environment, you must have one node that is configured as the active node and one or more that are configured as passive nodes. Usually you would have a "one active + one passive" solution; however, it is also possible to configure a "one active + multiple passive" solution.
Where to install Arcserve Backup?
In a production environment, a cluster system might be shared by multiple cluster-aware applications. Each cluster-aware application should have its own virtual name and IP address and a dedicated shared disk. You have three choices for Arcserve Backup deployment:
The best practice is to create a dedicated group as the container for the virtual name/IP address and shared disk, and to deploy Arcserve Backup into the new created group. The benefit of this is that the risk of failover can be limited to the group level, and not to other applications. For example, a Arcserve Backup server failover will not impact a SQL Server.
Other cluster-aware applications (such as SQL Server Cluster) will create their own groups to manage application specified resources. It is possible for Arcserve Backup to share these groups with existing applications by installing Arcserve Backup into the shared disk in the same group.
Which Arcserve Backup database type to use?
Arcserve Backup primary server supports using a local Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Express Edition installation and a local or remote Microsoft SQL Server installation as the back-end database. However, a cluster-aware primary server only supports the following scenarios:
If you do not purchase a SQL Server cluster and can accept the limitations imposed by SQL Server 2014 Express, it is the best choice.
Note: In a MSCS cluster environment, if the Arcserve database is SQLE, the Arcserve Backup the database summary (on the Database manager) will display the physical name of the install path instead of the virtual name.
If there is existing SQL Server cluster in your production environment, you can use it as the database for Arcserve Backup.
Note: Arcserve Backup does not support local installations of Microsoft SQL Server for the Arcserve Backup database in NEC CLUSTERPRO/ExpressCluster environments.
You can also select a remote SQL Server as the Arcserve Backup database, which should safely provide 24x7 stable services.
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