LiveTime High Availability and Clustering

The LiveTime High Availability, Clustering option is designed for organizations requiring extremely high throughput and fault tolerance for LiveTime Service Manager and Help Desk. By natively supporting cluster management subsystems, load balancing and failover capabilities your service desk will always be available.

High Availability comes in many different forms. The core architecture has been specifically designed with this in mind. LiveTime supports full clustering with multiple nodes (Active – Active Cluster) as well as hot spares (Active – Passive Failover), where only one node is active, providing failover support in cases where the active node is unavailable.

In full clustering mode LiveTime can have and unlimited number of distributed nodes across multiple networks with load sharing based upon the local point of presence or workload of each server. In contrast, hot spares are designed as redundant servers, ready to take over when the logical node fails.

Illustration of the differences between full active clustering and passive failover in LiveTime.

Fundamentals

There are many layers involved when configuring LiveTime for High Availability. While LiveTime takes care of the inner workings of node management, there are also a number of external dependencies. Specifically, LiveTime requires both a data store and a file system, both of which need to be replicated, or shared, so that if one node becomes unavailable, LiveTime still has access.

In addition, LiveTime requires a high availability license for each MAC address in the cluster. LiveTime constantly monitors each node in the cluster using a heartbeat. When a primary (logical) node goes offline other nodes in the cluster are able to take over and continue with no loss of service. For optimal service delivery LiveTime executes many background tasks to ensure SLA’s are met, notifications are sent and other core services maintained.

This also requires that a failover switch is able to redirect traffic to the new logical node as the main entry point when there is a network outage. This can be a simple DNS switch or an active monitoring device.