In an environment where the file servers are grouped in a cluster, you can make the FSA Agent services that are running on them highly available. Then, if the cluster software detects the failure of the FSA Agent services on one node, it can quickly restart the services on another node in the cluster. This process is commonly known as "failover".
For example, Figure: Sample FSA cluster configuration shows an environment in which three file servers are clustered together.
All the servers have a shared disk configured; you can only make the FSA Agent services highly available when there is a shared disk resource. If the FSA Agent services on one node in the cluster fail, they automatically fail over to another node in the cluster, thereby causing only a momentary pause in service.
Refer to the Enterprise Vault Compatibility Charts for details of the supported versions of this software, and the supported versions of Windows. The Compatibility Charts document is available on the Symantec Enterprise Support site at this address:
http://entsupport.symantec.com/docs/276547
The following cluster types are supported:
Active/passive cluster. To support high availability, the shared cluster resources are made available on one node of the cluster at a time. If a failure on the active cluster node occurs, the shared resources fail over to the passive node and users may continue to connect to the cluster without interruption.
Active/active cluster. To support load balancing and high availability, the cluster resources are split among two or more nodes. Each node in the cluster is the preferred owner of different resources. In the event of a failure of either cluster node, the shared resources on that node fail over to the remaining cluster nodes.
Enterprise Vault supports multiple nodes in any combination of active/passive and active/active. We have validated configurations with up to four nodes.
For guidelines on how to make the FSA Agent services highly available in a clustered environment, see the Setting up File System Archiving manual.