High Availability Setup for Introscope Enterprise Manager
High availability is typically requested for the MoM of an Enterprise Manager (EM) cluster, but can also be implemented for a stand-alone EM. HA for collectors is less common because the assumption is that other collectors take over the load of a failing collector.
There are two approaches to achieve high availability of the EM:
- EM Hot Failover
- "standard" approach based on HA software
EM Hot Failover
This solution is defined by Introscope and relies on features built into the Enterprise Manager. Two EMs are active at the same time and they negotiate which of them should be responsible for alerts etc. The setup is described in the Introscope Administration Guide (Administrating → Configure Enterprise Manager → Configure Enterprise Managers and Clusters → Use Enterprise Manager Failover, external link). Switching between the EMs relies on DNS changes. Unfortunately this approach cannot be used in combination with SAP Solution Manager since the SMDAgents responsible for administrating the EM are not capable of supporting this.
Standard Approach based on HA Software
The standard approach is to install services on a logical host and to switch this logical host between different physical hosts using some kind of HA software. This is supported by diagnostics agents and can also be used for Enterprise Managers. In comparison to the EM Hot Failover approach this approach causes the additional delay of starting the EM.