Management High Availability

[Herschel_Liang]

I have two server: Smart-1 5150 and Dell PowerEdge R730. Can they build management HA? I found that sk39345 does not describe restriction in different performance device. Does it mean that there is no restriction? Meanwhile, I am wonder that can it enable management cluster function as gateway after initialization?

[Danny]

Yes, two different machines is a supported management HA setup as long as they have identical GAiA OS and hotfixes. There is no restrictions with this (anymore). Management HA is not based on ClusterXL, the setup is therefore different to gateway clusters.

[Herschel_Liang]

So, you mean that there is no way enable HA after initialize to Management while management HA is not based on ClusterXL. Right?

[Tal_Paz-Fridman · Accepted solution]

Hi,

ClusterXL is just for Security Gateways and you can set a Gateway Cluster any time you like.

When you setup a Management HA environment you do get High Availability but it has a different mechanism and behavior than the one employed in gateways. 

In a Security Gateways Cluster you get immediate fail-over capability which is not needed for Managements.

HTH

Tal

[Herschel_Liang]

Maybe I express a little ambiguous. I didn't mean that I need failover in management ha, I just want to know can enable this ha function after initialization.

[Tal_Paz-Fridman]

Oh sorry.

There are several triggers which automatically synchronize the Security Management Servers.

You can read about it in Management High Availability section of the Security Management R80.30 Administration Guide

https://sc1.checkpoint.com/documents/R80.30/WebAdminGuides/EN/CP_R80.30_SecurityManagement_AdminGuid...

In a nutshell:

Synchronizing Active and Standby Servers

At intervals, the Active server synchronizes with the standby server or servers, and when you publish the session. Sessions that are not published are not synchronized.

HTH

Tal

[Maarten_Sjouw]

To answer your actual question: During the FTW you setup a single management server as a Primary management server (this is the default). So a year later when you are ready to add a HA management server, you install it with the same version software and during the FTW you set it up as a secondary management server. now add the Jumbo to be at the same level as the primary. Then you add it in SmartConsole and establish SIC and youre done.

[G_W_Albrecht]

I would not dare to say that times of Management HA have gone by already (a thing that everybody hopes for Full Management HA cluster configurations), but out of experience, a Management Server is best kept in a VM ! Only very special environments still profit from secondary Management servers...

[Herschel_Liang]

The client is finance company, High available is always for one of their consideration first.