Resilient Netsight

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Have a scenario where I need a resilient NetSight, but not sure how best or even if this is the right course of action.

The scenario is that wireless external captive portal Guest Registration has been configured with sponsorship. There is resilient wireless controllers and NAC configured, one in each location.

The problem arises should NeSight go down, you loose the means to send the sponsorship email - which seems like a lot of effort for such a small thing but it has the potential of grinding the whole process to a halt.

Believe its the only thing that you would loose in this scenario that would stop this working?

So wondering if anyone knows what can be done about it?

Many thanks in advance.

[Ryan_Yacobucci]

Hello,

We have seen customers have an Extreme Management server deployed as the primary, and then a backup separate server with the same IP address and kept up to date with database restore. In the case of a complete failure the primary would be shut down and the backup would be turned on, but this would result in a loss of data depending on how often the backup was kept up to date.

There is also a failover plan if using VMware EXS for the Extreme Management server. This utilizes VMware ESX high availability features.

In the NetSight help search for "High Availability" and it's the article titled "Extreme Management Center Failover with VMware ESX"

As far as wireless redirect goes you can configure a DNS name that resolves to two NACs and it should fail over if the primary NAC fails. I've tested this in the lab.

The sponsorship email part I haven't tested, but it may work.

Thanks
-Ryan

[Anonymous]

Hi James,

Thanks for posting. Will look into the high availability and post back if anything turns up. Unfortunately the VMware HA isn't an option in this case.

Regarding the sponsorship URL and web redirect.....

There is two sites A & B, each site has a wireless controller that is configured for high availability, at the moment just one NetSight and a NAC at each site.

The scenario is just from the perspective of site A:

1. Site A NAC goes down, both wireless controllers use ewcredirect.domain.com as their web redirect. If this resolves to NAC A it would no longer be able to display the Guest Registration page unless it is now able to resolve to site B NAC.
2. Sponsorship email is sent by NetSight. In the sponsorship email there is the link to the sponsorship page to ewcredirect.domain.com which resolves to NAC A, but if NAC A fails you need to resolve to NAC B.

Think the only way to resolve this is by means of the introduction of a load balancer, but interested to hear what the community says.

Many thanks.

[James_A]

In the NetSight about window, I see "High Availability" as an unlicensed feature, so it is perhaps available. Short of that, using VMware HA would be pretty good solution in terms of hardware failure.

For resilient NACs, the URL for the sponsorship does go to the right NAC URL depending on which one the EWC is talking to.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick response Ryan.

Guess that is the answer but really did need something that is truly resilient, so there was no noticeable effect. Predominantly to give manoeuvre that should something physically break the visibility to the customer is nil and gives the time to fix it, say for example the hard disk's completely crash, corrupt or fall over - it could take some time to get back into full service.

Assume this is the only option that you are aware of?

The other conundrum is the resilient creation of the web redirect in the wireless controller and access to the sponsorship page, which I can only see function with the inclusion of load balancer, especially with EXOS not having the feature to do this inside the switch configuration - unless you know otherwise?

For example; you configure the web redirect in the wireless controller to go to ewcredirect.domain.com, which resolves to the first NAC 10.10.10.10. If the NAC fails you need ewcredirect.domain.com to resolve to the second NAC 10.10.10.20?

The other example is that the sponsorship email is sent with a URL for the sponsorship page, but if you have resilient NAC's in two different locations you need that URL to resolve to one or the other should the other go offline, again requiring a load balancer.

Could be approaching this wrong, so interested to hear any other options.

Cheers.

[Ryan_Yacobucci]

Hello Martin,

To my knowledge you should be able to get by any NetSight outage for captive portal by enabling survivable registration. NAC detects problem with the NetSight and puts them right through until NetSight comes back, then attempts to put them back through registration.

Thanks
-Ryan