9/4/2020 IM and Presence Server High Availability - Cisco

IM and Presence Server High Availability

Updated: February 7, 2017 Document ID: 200958

Contents

Introduction

Prerequisites

Requirements

Components used

IM and Presence High Availability(HA)

Redundancy Group Conguration

Monitored IM and Presence Services

User Failover Process

Jabber Client Re-Login Timer

IM and Presence Fallback Types

Manual Fallback
Automatic Fallback
Troubleshoot IM and Presence High Availability

Introduction
This document describes how Instant Message and Presence (IM&P) High Availability (also known as
Redundancy) works in an enterprise IM and Presence environment and how to troubleshoot it.

Prerequisites

Requirements
Cisco recommends that you have knowledge of these topics:
Cisco Unied IM&P
Cisco Jabber clients

Components used
Cisco Unied IM&P 10.0 and above
Cisco Jabber clients 9.6 and above
The information in this document was created from the components in a specic lab environment. All of the
components used in this document started with a cleared (default) conguration. If your network is live,
ensure that you understand the potential impact of any command.

IM and Presence High Availability(HA)

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IM and Presence oers high availability or redundancy in the form of logical server groups in the CUCM
conguration.  This conguration is passed to IM and Presence and then utilized to allow for redundancy in
the event of an IM and Presence service or server failure.  When a HA event takes place, the end user's
sessions are moved from the failed server to the backup.  When the server has been restored to a normal
state, user sessions are then moved back either automatically or manually by the administrator.  

Redundancy Group Conguration

The redundancy group is the logical server pair that allows for the assignment of a server to the IM and
Presence subcluster as well as the conguration for HA.  In order to access this portion of the conguration
can be found in the CUCM server web page.
System > Presence Redundancy Groups

When the administrator adds the IM&P Publisher to the System > Server conguration on CUCM and the
IM&P server is saved, the DefaultCUPSubCluster redundancy group gets created with the Publisher assigned
to it.  
When created, the Redundancy Group will look like this:

This Redundancy Group translates to the IM and Presence subcluster.  In the current state of the Redundancy
Group conguration in CUCM, this would be what it would look like in the IM and Presence Cluster Topology
web page:

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We see that the IM&P Publisher is assigned to the DefaultCUPSubcluster and the Subscriber server is not.
 This is because the IM&P Subscriber server is not assigned to the Redundancy Group in the CUCM
conguration.
Assign the Subscriber to the Redundancy Group:
In order to assign the Subscriber server to the Redundancy Group, simply select the subscriber server from
the dropdown then Save the conguration change.

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After the IM&P Subscriber is added to the Redundancy Group:

We see after the addition of the secondary node(the subscriber) we get the High Availability option.  In order
to enable High Availability, we would simply need to select the Enable High Availability checkbox and Save
the conguration change.
After High Availability is enabled:

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The page will auto-refresh the sever state and reason.  When the server is in an initialization state, this
means that the two servers are able to communicate.  The servers would then verify service status before
the state transitions to a Normal state.  If the two servers can connect to each other and all monitored
services are up on both, we would then get a Normal-Normal state. This means that all monitored services
are active on the IM&P Servers.
Normal-Normal Redundancy Group State:

Normal-Normal High Availability State in the IM&P Topology Page:

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Monitored IM and Presence Services

Since a customer could have various deployment models: IM Only, IM with SIP/XMPP Federation, IM with
Compliance, IM with persistent chat, Remote Call Control Only, etc., the actual list of which of these
processes to monitor is dynamic. By default the these items are always monitored when HA is enabled:
IDS Database
Presence Engine (if activated)
XCP Router
The Server Recovery Manager checks to determine if compliance(Message Archiver), persistent chat(Text
Conference Manager), SIP federation(SIP Federation Connection Manager), XMPP federation(XMPP
Federation Connection Manager)are congured (and activated).  If they are both congured and activated,
Server Recovery Manager(SRM) will monitor those services as well.

User Failover Process

When a failover takes place(automatic or manual), the major point to remember is that the user account is
not moved from one server to the other, but only the user session in Presence Engine is moved.  In pre-10
versions of IM and Presence, the user assignment was moved from one server to the other.  This user move
was very expensive to server resources and added to the load that was on the server.  In 10.X and later, the
user stays homed on the server that they are assigned to, and the backend user session in the Presence
Engine is moved from the failed node to the functional node.  The user does not have to exit Jabber and re-
log in when the change happens with Server Recovery Manager(SRM).

Jabber Client Re-Login Timer

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In order for the user session to become fully active on the secondary IM&P node after a failover event, the
user must attempt to log in to that server via SOAP(Client Prole Agent).  This happens automatically with the
one-time password that is passed from the IMDB database. Since log ins are extremely expensive to
resources on the IM and Presence server, there must be a way to throttle log ins when a failover event
occurs.  This throttle or buer will allow all users to log in to the secondary node without service disruption
for users on the secondary node.  The mechanism that is used to throttle user log ins are the Client Re-
Login Lower Limit and Client Re-Login Upper Limit Server Recovery Manager(SRM) service parameters.  
Client Re-Login Lower Limit - the parameter that denes the minimum amount of time(in seconds) that the
Jabber client will wait before the client attempts to log in to the secondary server in the event of an HA
event.
Client Re-Login Upper Limit - the parameter that denes the maximum amount of time(in seconds) that the
Jabber client will wait before the client attempts to log in to the secondary server in the event of an HA
event.
The Jabber client receives these parameters at log in to the server and caches the values for future use.
 When we receive a HA event from the IM&P server, the client will choose a random number of seconds
between the upper and lower limits and wait that amount of time before the Jabber client attempts to log in
to the secondary.  Once the timer expires, the client will attempt SOAP log in to the secondary node.

IM and Presence Fallback Types

If there is user failover, there must be user fallback when service is restored on the problematic server.
 There are two types of server fallback:

Manual Fallback
Manual fallback(default conguration for Server Recovery Manager) takes place when service has been
restored and the redundancy group allows the Fallback button. When this button is selected, the user
sessions that were moved to the secondary node, will be moved back to their homed node.The Jabber client
will apply the re-log in upper and lower limits for the fallback.

Automatic Fallback
Automatic fallback takes place when the server monitors the services and the Server Recovery
Manager(SRM) service will automatically fallback users to their homed nodes.  The key in this conguration is
that the Server Recovery Manager(SRM) service will wait 30 minutes for a failed service/server to remain
active before an automatic fallback is initiated.  Once this 30 minute up time is established, user sessions are

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moved back to their homed nodes.  The Jabber client will apply the re-log in upper and lower limits for the
fallback. 
Automatic fallback is not the default conguration, but it can be enabled.  To enable automatic fallback,
change the Enable Automatic Fallback parameter in the Server Recovery Manager Service Parameters to
value True.

Troubleshoot IM and Presence High Availability

In order to troubleshoot issues with HA on IM and Presence collect the information:
Server Recover Manager(SRM) logs from before and after the failover event(debug level if possible)
Output of the command  via IM&P command line interface run sql select * from enterprisesubcluster
The enterprisesubcluster table in IM&P houses the Redundancy Group conguration
Output of the command  via IM&P command line interface run sql select * from enterprisenode
The enterprisenode table will display the node information and subcluster assignment of the node

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