Enabling Automatic Failovers

Automatic CommServe failover provides high service availability for the CommServe server, which in turn, lowers the downtime for backups, restores, and other operations in a CommCell. When automatic failover is enabled, if a failure occurs, the active CommServe host automatically fails over to the standby CommServe host. Monitoring nodes are used to monitor the active CommServe host in real-time, to obtain the information necessary to detect failures, and to perform a successful failover to a standby CommServe host.

Before You Begin

• Install the High Availability Computing (HAC) package on the CommServe Instance001 and CommServe Instance002 in both the active and standby CommServe hosts.

  • For more information on HAC requirements, see Preinstallation Checklist for High Availability Computing.

  • For more information on installing the HAC package, see Installing Commvault Remotely Using the CommCell Console.

    Note

    The High Availability Computing package is located under Tools in the packages list.

• Enable the CommServe LiveSync as described in Enabling CommServe LiveSync.

Procedure

1. From the navigation pane, go to Manage > System.

   The System page appears.

2. Click the CommServe LiveSync tile.

   The CommServe LiveSync page appears.

3. Slide the Automatic Failover toggle key to the right, to enable the option.

Results

• By default, 3 MediaAgents will be automatically selected and listed as the Monitoring Nodes. If necessary, you can add or delete the monitoring nodes, as described in Adding Monitoring Nodes for Automatic Failover.

  Note

  A minimum of 3 monitoring nodes must be maintained.

• The monitoring nodes and the failover CommServe host(s) periodically check the active CommServe host, and automatically fails over to the standby CommServe host when the active CommServe host is not reachable. The failover occurs only when the following conditions are satisfied:

  • The monitoring nodes and the failover CommServe host(s) are not able to communicate with the CommServe (Instance001) in the active CommServe host.

  • The monitoring nodes and the failover CommServe host(s) are able to reach the other clients in the network.

  • There is a monitoring node in the same network as each failover CommServe host(s). Commvault uses a monitoring node to determine whether to automatically failover when the active node is down and not to auto failover due to network outage.

• When more than one standby CommServe hosts are available, the standby CommServe host with the most recent database will be used for the failover. If all standby CommServe host databases are in sync, the system will fail over to the host that has the lowest Client ID (for example, if Client ID 001, Client ID 002, and Client ID 003 are in synch, the system will fail over to Client ID 001).

• After automatic failover to the standby CommServe host, CSLiveSync monitoring automatically marks the previously active CommServe host as passive after it is reachable again.