Failover architectures

Network Manager failover is implemented independently of failover in the products and components with which it integrates. Before configuring failover, you must understand the failover architectures that can be implemented to help ensure high availability of your Network Manager installation.

A Network Manager failover installation contains a primary and a backup Network Manager server on which the core components are installed. If the primary server fails due to problems with the hardware or software, the backup server assumes the role of the primary server. For a more robust environment, you can additionally include one or more of the following failover configurations:
  • A primary and a backup Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus ObjectServer
  • Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus Web GUI data source failover
  • An NCIM topology database high availability configuration
    Note: In previous Network Manager releases, users could include an NCIM topology database failover configuration by using NCIM replication (also referred to as NCIM topology database replication). The NCIM replication feature has been replaced by the high availability feature that is provided by the supported database:
    • If you have a Db2® database, you can use the High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR) feature to set up failover for NCIM.
    • If you have an Oracle database, you can use the Real Application Clusters (RAC) feature to set up failover for NCIM.
    This NCIM topology database high availability configuration ensures that network polling can continue on the backup installation, and topology views are replicated.

To accommodate either hardware or software failure, and for optimum performance of your environment, implement your failover solution on more than one computer.