Cisco Redundancy Models for Cisco TMS
Cisco TMS redundancy configuration and overview
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After the Cisco TMS installation completes, you will be prompted to reboot the server. Reboot the
server. After the server restarts, you must make the Cisco TMS portion of the server inactive by
stopping all the Cisco TMS and Web services and setting them to manual startup. Open the Services
tool from Administrative Tools in the Windows smart menu, and stop all services whose name starts
with Cisco TMS and the WWWPublishingService service. Right-click on each of these services and
select Properties. On the General tab of each of the services you stopped, set startup type to Manual.
The server now has Cisco TMS installed, but is not actively running. Repeat these steps for each
additional ‘warm spare’ server you wish to have.
Part of the Cisco TMS installation will consist of files added or customized by users and
administrators. These files must be synchronized from the primary server to the off-site server. The
setup of this synchronization should be configured as part of the installation process. Please see
Section
0 Customer specific TMS Files
for more details on these files and methods to synchronize
them between servers.
After the off-site Cisco TMS server has been installed, and the customer specific files have been setup
to be copied, no further configuration is required. The SQL database at the off-site location will be
updated from the primary site, and therefore no Cisco TMS configuration is required on the off-site
Cisco TMS server. The off-site Cisco TMS server should always be off-line unless it is being upgraded
or is being promoted to the active server.
Maintenance
Users should regularly backup the SQL database. The interval between backups defines the
maximum time window over which data would be lost. Typical installations would perform full nightly
backups of the database. Please see the Section
0 Backup and Recovery of the TMS database
for
details on how to perform backups and restores of the database. The secondary SQL server does not
need to be backed up explicitly as it is always updated from the primary SQL server.
Customer files must be synchronized between Cisco TMS servers as discussed in the installation
section. Please see Section
0 Customer specific TMS Files
for details.
Upgrading TMS
All Cisco TMS servers accessing the same database must be running the same Cisco TMS version.
When upgrading between Cisco TMS versions, there will be inconsistencies between different servers
as each is upgraded so extra steps are required when performing Cisco TMS upgrades or patches.
These steps assume you are only using one Cisco TMS server in both the primary and off-site
locations. You may combine this model with other Cisco TMS deployment models such as using a
Network Load Balancer with multiple Cisco TMS servers in each location. The instructions for
upgrading such a scenario will not be documented here, but would follow the same methods where
you would use the upgrade steps outlined in previous sections within each site. It is critical that the off-
site location must be completely disabled, all Cisco TMS services and websites after the upgrade, until
the off-site location is activated to become the primary site.
When performing a Cisco TMS upgrade, the following steps must be followed
Plan an upgrade during a time window when Cisco TMS can be made unavailable to users as
Cisco TMS will be unavailable during the duration of your upgrade
Log into the Windows console the primary Cisco TMS server, and from the Services component
of Computer Management, manually stop all services whose name starts with Cisco TMS and the
WWWPublishingSevice service. The off-site Cisco TMS server should already be stopped but
verify before proceeding.
Start on the primary Cisco TMS server. Start the installer for the Cisco TMS upgrade as normal.
During this process, any updates to the SQL database will be performed.
The installer will likely restart the Cisco TMS services and WWWPublishingService and may
require a reboot of the server. After the reboot, go into Services component of Computer
Management, manually stop all services whose name starts with Cisco TMS and the
WWWPublishingService
Force a replication of the tmsng database to the off-site SQL server. Wait for the off-site SQL
server to complete its update before proceeding.
