HA Deployment Configuration Selection

Vocera Platform provides a high availability (HA) feature for automatic fail over in a cluster.

When the primary server or node in a cluster experiences a failure, the system will fail over from a primary server to a standby server. HA clusters use a heartbeat signal sent over the network for health and status monitoring of the cluster. Vocera Platform provides an active-passive model with the following two options to manage the VIP:

Unlike other complex systems that follow an active-active HA model to distribute the load between multiple servers, the Vocera Platform follows an active-passive model. Which means, the entire workload is directed to one single server (with a valid IP address) and cannot be shared across multiple servers.

The following two network arrangement types can be configured:

A) Layer 2 Adjacent Deployment Model: All nodes in the cluster are all located within the same IP subnet; i.e., the primary and all standby servers are Ethernet Layer 2 Adjacent to each other.

B) Third-Party Load Balancer (Non-Layer 2 Adjacent) Deployment Model: One or more nodes in the cluster are not in the same subnet as the others; i.e., at least one node is required to traverse through a network router in order to connect to the other nodes in the cluster.