Cisco Digital Media Suite - Failover Servers v.5.2.3 Data Sheet

The Cisco^® Digital Media Suite (DMS) is a comprehensive offering of webcasting and video sharing, digital signage, and business IPTV applications that can help transform how organizations learn, grow, communicate, and collaborate. Support from the broad Cisco partner ecosystem of deployment, solution-development, and content-creation partners help ensure a successful digital media implementation.

The Cisco Digital Media Suite Failover Servers are optional, server-based products that provide hot failover support for the Cisco Digital Media Manager and Show and Share applications.

Cisco Digital Media Suite Failover Servers

Cisco Digital Media Manager Failover Servers support both Digital Signs and Show and Share implementations. Each primary server is paired with a separate, Secondary or Failover Server. A Cisco Digital Signs implementation requires that the primary Digital Media Manager (DMM) server be paired with a DMM Failover server that would act as the secondary server. A Cisco Show and Share implementation would required both a DMM primary/secondary configuration and a Show and Share primary and Show and Share Failover server configuration.

During the initial installation all optional software modules and licenses installed on the Primary are automatically copied and configured on the Secondary server. This initial installation also includes copying all system information and data from the Primary to the Secondary.

The Primary and Secondary servers (also known as a DMS cluster) are connected to each other via a Layer 2 network connection. This port is used for “heartbeat” and data replication operations between the primary and secondary servers. The second network port on each server is connected to the organization IP intranet for general user access.

Operation of Failover

The secondary, or standby, server issues periodic “heartbeat” commands to the primary server to validate primary server availability. If the primary server does not respond within a fixed number of “heartbeat” commands the secondary server will automatically become the primary server. A primary server will be deemed unavailable if it does not respond to the “hearbeat” commands or if critical operating service failures occur. A failover event will not occur if a physical resource inside of the server (such as a Hard Drive) or an application fails. This release of the DMS Failover servers will support a state-less failover; users connected to the primary will simply re-establish a connection via a browser refresh and can resume operations almost immediately.

Alerts and Notifications

Events related to DMS redundancy will be displayed in the DMS Administration alerts browser. In addition to this, it will be possible to configure notification rules for both SNMP and email notifications, through the DMS Administration interface, based on the following events:

●   The failure of an appliance that is part of an active DMS cluster

●   A server appliance that is part of an active DMS cluster is reachable again after a failure

Server Appliance Requirements and Ordering Information

The DMS Failover servers are based on Cisco UCS server appliances and require that the primary server have the identical UCS server appliance configurations. Cisco DMS customers with older MCS-based server appliances will need to first migrate to the UCS server appliances before implementing a DMS failover configuration.

Cisco Services

Cisco and our partners provide a broad portfolio of intelligent, personalized services and support that can help you realize the full value of your video investment, and increase business agility and network availability. This portfolio of services drives business transformation through a network-based collaboration platform that enables business to collaborate anywhere, anytime. For more information about these services, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/services/digitalmedia.

For More Information

For more information about the Cisco Digital Media Suite, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/dms or contact your local Cisco account representative.