Protecting the Control Service › Switch the Roles of the Active and Standby Control Services

Switch the Roles of the Active and Standby Control Services

The shutting down of a Control Service, either intentionally or due to a crash, presents a unique problem. When the Control Service is down, the Overview Page and the Manager are disconnected. Consequently, they can no longer receive updated information, and they cannot display a visible indication to the type of event that occurred. Although the Overview Page and the Manager are up, you cannot see that the Control Service is down, and you cannot manually initiate a switchover at this stage.

Arcserve RHA handles the disconnection problem by automatically trying to restore the Control Service ("Manager") to its active state. If the attempt fails, and the active Control Service is still detected as down, Arcserve RHA automatically initiates a switchover. During the switchover, the standby Control Service becomes the active Control Service. Following that, the Overview Page and the Manager are automatically reconnected to the new active Control Service, and once again they display the updated state of your system. During the reconnection, you may be prompted to log in again.

When the original active Control Service is up again, Arcserve RHA automatically initiates a backward scenario. The backward scenario is a replication in the reverse direction: from the new active Control Service server to the new standby Control Service server. At this stage, you can reverse back the roles of the Control Services. All you need to do is to manually initiate a switchback, meaning, a switchover in the opposite direction.

In addition to the default automatic switchover, you can also manually initiate a switchover between the active and standby Control Services. Once triggered, whether manually or automatically, the switchover process itself is fully automated.

There are several stages in the role switching of the active and standby Control Services:

1. Initiating a switchover - this can be done either automatically by the system, when it detects that the active Control Service is down, or manually by you.
2. The switchover process and the automatic initiation of a backward scenario - these processes are performed automatically and you cannot disabled them.
3. Initiating a switchback - this can only be done manually by you, when you decide that the original active Control Service can become the active server again.