Automatic CommServe failover provides high availability for the CommServe server, reducing downtime for backups, restores, and other operations in a CommCell. If a failure occurs, automatic failover helps transition CommServe operations from the active CommServe host to the standby CommServe host. Monitoring nodes monitor the active CommServe host to detect failures and provide the information required to facilitate failover to the standby CommServe host.
Important
Automatic failover checks the database synchronization state before proceeding. If automatic failover cannot proceed, the software sends an email alert to the administrator with instructions to initiate failover using the appropriate command.
Before initiating failover, check the database synchronization state. If database synchronization is not complete, recent changes might not be retained after the failover.
Before You Begin
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Install the High Availability Computing (HAC) package on CommServe Instance001 and CommServe Instance002 on both the active and standby CommServe hosts.
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For more information about HAC requirements, see Preinstallation Checklist for High Availability Computing.
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For more information about installing the HAC package, see Installing Commvault Remotely Using the CommCell Console.
Note
The High Availability Computing package is located under Tools in the packages list.
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Enable CommServe LiveSync as described in Enabling CommServe LiveSync.
Procedure
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From the Command Center navigation pane, go to Manage > Settings > Global.
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On the Advanced options tab, enable the Automatic failover toggle key.
Next steps
Add at least 3 MediaAgents as monitoring nodes.
Results
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The monitoring nodes and failover CommServe hosts periodically check the active CommServe host. If the active CommServe host is not reachable, automatic failover occurs only when all of the following conditions are met:
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The monitoring nodes and failover CommServe hosts cannot communicate with CommServe (Instance001) on the active CommServe host.
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The monitoring nodes and failover CommServe hosts can reach other clients in the network.
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At least one monitoring node is in the same network as each failover CommServe host. Commvault uses the monitoring node to determine whether the active CommServe host is down and to prevent automatic failover during a network outage.
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If more than one standby CommServe host is available, the standby CommServe host with the most recent database is used for failover. If the databases on all standby CommServe hosts are in sync, the system fails over to the host with the lowest Client ID. For example, if Client ID 001, Client ID 002, and Client ID 003 are in sync, the system fails over to Client ID 001.
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After an automatic failover to the standby CommServe host, CSLiveSync monitoring automatically marks the previously active CommServe host as passive when that host becomes reachable again.