2X Backup Server vs. Second Gateway

[scottyyyc]

Hi There,

We've been running 2X for some time (currently v10.5), and are looking at adding a bit of resiliency to our farm. I've been testing the backup server functionality, and I don't quite think it works in a 'failover' type of capacity (please correct me if I'm mistaken).

The ultimate end goal is to have some failover capacity for end-users, so if 2X-SRV-A is down/unreachable, the client will automatically failover to 2X-SRV-B. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is more about 2 gateways (and specifying a secondary connection within the client), not a "backup" server.

What are the pros/cons to a second gateway vs. a backup server? Thoughts?

 

[christopher.flores]

Hi,

A backup server configured within a 2X Farm is basically there to allow redundancy on the Publishing Agent and not the gateways.

If you would like to have redundancy between your gateways, I would recommend checking the following out:

http://www.2x.com/blog/2010/03/tech/how ... redundant/ and
http://www.2x.com/docs/en/whitepapers/p ... teways.pdf

Thanks

 

[scottyyyc]

Would setting up two gateway servers (and setting one as the alternate connection within the client) effectively have the same result as the NLB config? Why would one go to the trouble of setting up NLB is this functionality is baked into the client? What am I missing here?

 

[jpc]

Setting it up in NLB would allow to do proper load-balancing instead of just as a backup i.e. without NLB the second server will remain unused until the main server fails.

 

[scottyyyc]

Thanks for clearing this up. I'd actually prefer to keep it as failover-only (not load balanced).