The Enterprise edition of NetFlow Analyzer is based on a collector – central server architecture. In, the distributed architecture data collection to be done by collectors which sends the collected data to the central server from where all the reporting takes place. This provides higher scalability and performance to the Enterprise edition by making it capable to handle up to 20,000 interfaces and each collector to handle 10,000 flows per second.
To use failover feature, all you need is a second server identical to the primary central server in configurations which acts as the hot standby server.The machine can be located in the same network or even in a geographically separated DR center. You only need to ensure that both the primary and hot standby server (failover machine) can communicate with each other and that the collectors can reach the failover machine if the primary server is down.
In this setup, the primary server is the central machine which receives all the data from the collectors located at various locations.The collectors are configured with the primary server IP Address so that the collected data is sent across in real time. To enable failover, you can navigate to ‘Settings’ under ‘Admin Operations’ and click on the the ‘Failover Settings’ tab. From here, you can enable failover by simply clicking on the ‘Enable’ radio button.
Now download and install the Enterprise edition central server on the machine you intend to use as the hotstandby server. You need to ensure the following:
1. The Operating System and hardware on both the primary server and hotstandby server should be identical.
2. The time and timezone on the primary server and hotstandby server should be same.
After the installation is complete, do not run the central server installation. Before running the installation, copy the data and tmp folder which were backed up earlier to the <NetFlow_Central>/mysql/ directory and<NetFlow_Central> directory respectively. You will be prompted to overwrite the existing file and you can proceed with this step. This is needed so that the data and configurations which have been stored in the primary server is available in the hotstandby server. Once the copying of database is complete, start the hotstandby server from ‘All Programs > ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer EE – Central server > Replication > Start hotstandby server’. You will be prompted to enter the host name/ IP Address of the primary server and HTTPS port (by default it is 443).
You can change the port used for communication whichever port you prefer. At this step, the hotstandby server communicates with the primary server and updates its details to the primary server database. The primary server will update all the collectors with the information about the hotstandby server thus relieving the user from the task of updating all the collectors with this information.
Guess you can take a break now ! Part 3 of this blog will outline how the hotstandby server becomes the primary server. For those who would like to have a go at it now, do try the NetFlow Analyzer Enterprise edition.
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Regards,
Don Thomas Jacob
