testing failover for server edition

[nothingworks101]

we have ipo server edition rel 9.1.. 2 separate co-lo's with a primary in one and the secondary in the other and 1 remote office with 20 phones. if I reboot the primary all the phones re-register to the backup. but we were trying to test different types of failures and wanted to see what happens if they just lose connection instead of the system going down... so the vpn tunnel to our remote office pointing the primary co-lo was turned off and the phones got stuck in discover and wouldn't re-register. the vpn to the backup co-lo was left running.

the cisco tech also tried to add the backup server to the 242 string, but that didn't help? any thoughts on why I way worked and not the other ?


thanks in advance

 

[vztech]

If you watch your phones do they try to discover the secondary IP ? What version 9.1.??

I used to have super powers but my therapist took them away...

 

[Seacats]

There are cut in parameters that have to be fulfilled before the secondary will accept registrations of guest phones. One of those is that the secondary can no longer communicate with the primary. I suspect in your case that it still can because you've only taken down the link from the remote office to the Primary. In that scenario the secondary will not accept registrations.

Query this comment - 'if I reboot the primary all the phones re-register to the backup' - that shouldn't happen, the idea is that the failover time is high enough that phones are not failing over unnecessarily due to system reboots etc. - unless you meant a shutdown.

 

[nothingworks101]

thanks seacats, I did mean we were shutting it down.

do you know if in select mode, which says active, active will allow the phones to register to the other sever if it is still up? I can see how this may come up. just losing the connection to the primary but the server is still working.

the scenario that came which causes us to test, was where the main co-lo lost a firewall. so our site with the phones was still good and had the 2nd vpn to the backup co-lo. and since we had a dedicated circuit between them the 2 ipo's were still able to see each other. so as you say it wasn't down.. but the notes on select say you can share the load, so maybe it dosnt need to see it down to allow a phone to reg.