WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager
Ensuring High Availability Operation of Your WhatsUp Gold Platform
How does automated failover work?
Failover automation takes place using a "heartbeat" mechanism that connects the Primary and Secondary server. As long as a regular "pulse" or "heartbeat" connects the main (Primary) server to the second (Secondary) server, the latter does not initiate its systems.
The Secondary server takes over the work of the first server as soon as it detects and validates an alteration in the "heartbeat" of the first machine. Alternatively, an intelligent primary system can request the secondary server to take over its role, if it detects issues with its own functioning.
Which versions of WhatsUp Gold does Failover Manager support?
WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager supports all WhatsUp Gold versions – Standard, Premium, Distributed and MSP running on all current Windows operations systems.
It is important to note that both the Primary and Secondary machines need to be running the same version of WhatsUp Gold in order to operate properly.
Can WhatsUp Gold Failover be deployed as a Virtual Machine?
WhatsUp Gold and WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager can operate on virtual machines powered by VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server, as long as the virtual server's resources meet the WhatsUp Gold system requirements.
Which monitor types are supported by WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager?
WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager supports all Active and Performance Monitors.
Passive monitors like Syslog and SNMP traps are typically not supported as they require a destination IP address to be set in the monitored device. When the system fails over from Primary to Secondary, the WhatsUp Gold server IP address changes – and it no longer receives the messages from the devices.
For Flow Monitor, the flow sources (including Flow Publisher installations) can be configured with both Primary and Secondary IP addresses so that they route flow statistics to both destinations. The Secondary merely discards the flow records until it takes over as the Primary system.
Windows Event based passive monitors are supported by Failover as they are configured on the same host system running WhatsUp Gold and Failover.
How does WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager help protect against monitoring data loss?
The WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager deployment architecture can involve two or three separate hardware or virtual machine instances in two separate configurations. This helps guard against monitoring data loss when the functioning of the Primary server is impaired.
In the first kind of deployment architecture, the monitoring database can be hosted on the Secondary server itself. Thus loss of connectivity to the Primary system does not affect the data collection and updates to the database.
Alternate deployment architecture would involve running the Primary and Secondary servers on different hardware or virtual machine instances. The database operates on a third machine instance that is remotely accessed by either the Primary or the Secondary server.