It would be amazing to have a true cluster for ZCM. At the moment when registering devices in ZCM, you always register them to one primary. If that primary goes down for any reason, the client as problems connecting to the zcm zone.
If this service could be clustered in any way, that would be really amazing. Perhaps a virtual node that is always alive in the zone?
by: Garth L. | over a year ago | Other
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We are going to work around this limitation by having our MDT task sequence in our Windows deployment process run a script that checks to see if the registration server is up and if not, try another one until it succeeds or eventually fails if none are available.
@garth a device is not dedicated to the primary it is registered with. It can connect and sync up with any of the other available ones as configured in the Location settings
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The (ENGL Toolkit) script that does the agent registration tests the ZCM primaries before the actual registration takes place. If the test fails it tests another Primary up until it finds one that works. This is done in a random order, so every registration potentially uses another primary server.
The things is just once we have successfully tested a Primary and use that for Agent registration which then fails it gets hard to recover from that situation. A cluster won't help in that case as the node you register to still might fail. Maybe a (HA-) reverse proxy setup might help. Anyway: to recover from a failed registration is still hard as how the Agent 'works' today and to get more control after registration I believe we need an zac command line registration feature, see https://ideas.microfocus.com/MFI/novell-zcm/Idea/Detail/855
Then we can pick up the success or fail more easily and recover from that by 'cleaning up' the fail condition, test another Primary and use that for registration.
now that mobile is supported, this is a very big deal.
the mobile device will only talk to the server you register to. If that server is down, decommissioned or the cert changes, you orphan the mobile device. having a load balancer for the zone would assure that devices stay managed.
I agree. Mobile management needs to work regardless of the availability of any particular server.
As pointed out in earlier comments, for ZENworks managed workstations, devices are not really tied to one server. However, in case of mobile devices they are tied to one server. One way to avoid this is to ensure that mobile devices use a reverse proxy solution in front of ZENworks MDM servers. There is a recent cool solution on how to do this: https://www.novell.com/communities/coolsolutions/cool_tools/managing-devices-using-zenworks-reverse-proxy/
This would shield mobile devices from being tied to one ZENworks primary and would provide fault tolerance and disaster recovery.