I get a question from someone almost every day about a variation of the gateway scenario, so in a series of posts I’d like to expand on the gateway scenario and how it works. Let’s start with this question:

Question: You explain in the Gateway and PKI scenarios document how to make a Gateway fail over to a another Management Server in the event one fails. I have agents in an untrusted environment. How can I make my agents fail over to another Gateway in the event one of my Gateway fails?

In other words, our user wants to go from this: (click image for closer view)

Diagram 1 - Gateway Failover to Multiple Mgmt Servers

to this:(click image for closer view)

Diagram 2 - Agent Failover to Multiple Gateways

Answer: It’s important to remember that the Gateway is just another Management Server as far as the agent is concerned. To provide failover capability for agents in an untrusted environment, you can use Powershell to specify primary and alternate Management (or Gateway) Servers for an agent. The syntax would look something like this:

$primaryMS = Get-ManagementServer | where {your filter here}
$failoverMS = Get-ManagementServer | where {your filter here}
$agent = Get-Agent | where {$_Name -eq 'myagent.com'}
Set-ManagementServer -AgentManagedComputer: $agent -ManagementServer: $primaryMS -FailoverServer: $failoverMS

(NOTE: You’d want to write a for-each loop into this to enable for multiple agents at once)

Diagram 2 - (provided by the user) eliminates the Gateway to Management Server redundancy, which really is not necessary. You could have redundancy at both the agent and Gateway level, creating a truly high-availability solution.

In part 2 of our series, we’ll talk about what happens when the Gateway fails…

FYI - You can pre-order you copy Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed HERE. (Release date in January ‘08)