Reality dictates that sooner or later we all lose a Primary server to a total disaster. We often lose Satellites - they're just boxes that sit out in the harsh field environment. They can die a death before anyone has a chance to clean them up and so they can only be deleted from the Zone.
Unfortunately, they usually have a lot of roles explicitly assigned to them: Satellite roles (collection, imaging, content), Location Rules, Join Proxy and many many Discovery Tasks.
The problem is what happens to these roles when the primary/satellite is removed via ZCC/zman: The cleanup is a complex manual task of finding what that device was doing and reassigning that to some other device. It's prone to error and takes a great deal of time.
The ideal solution would be to have a facility whereby you can have a one-click option to move everything from one device to another. Allow an admin to quickly deploy a new Satellite or Appliance, assign all the limbo roles and tasks to it and then delete the dead one.
Example Scenario:
SatelliteA sits out in an ordinary open plan office, not in a data centre. After all, it's just a Windows box. It does Join Proxy, Authentication, Imaging, Collection and Content roles, it is at the top of a number of Location Rules and has several Discovery Tasks assigned to it.
One day someone trips over the power cable, pulls SatelliteA off the desk and trashes the hard drive. SatelliteA is dead.
No problem, a nearby device is promoted to be SatelliteB.
Now what? How do we get SatelliteB to assume all the Join Proxy, Authentication, Imaging, Collection and Content roles, Location Rules and Discovery Tasks that SatelliteA had been doing?
Currently we pay an admin to spend a a few hours going through ZCC setting this up.
Much better to have an option when deleting a device...
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This device is currently hosting the following roles:
Satellite
- Authentication
- Imaging
- Join proxy
- Collection
- Content
Location Rules
- Collection
- Content
- Authentication
- JoinProxy
Discovery Tasks
- 192.168.10.x
- 192.168.20.x
- 192.168.30.x
- VPN
Do you wish to move them to another Satellite? Y/N
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This could further be developed with more complex dialogues to allow moving different roles to different devices.
The dialogue could be decoupled from the deletion process so that roles could be moved prior to the planned decommissioning of a Satellite.
These enhancements would considerably improve the whole admin experience during a disaster recovery scenario.
NRFE / MG
by: Marcus G. | over a year ago | Supportability
Comments
NRFE / MG / 10982856003 / 964409
Related to https://ideas.microfocus.com/MFI/novell-zcm/Idea/Detail/2108