High availability for the PXE provisioning data store server

To have a truly highly available PXE provisioning implementation, the data store server, in addition to all of the other components of the provisioning environment, must be highly available.

The method that you use to implement high availability for the data store server depends on the technologies available in your organization. Regardless of your chosen solution, the following conditions are required:

• Each potential provisioning client at the primary site must have read access to the data store server data.
• To ensure a consistent provisioning result, any change that you make to the data on one data store server must be implemented on all data store servers running at that same site. Typically, you choose one server as the master and synchronize the data from that server to all other data store servers.

Implementation

The high-level steps required to implement a highly available data store server architecture are as follows:

1. Install two or more servers that enable read-only SMB and HTTP services to a data-store-specific directory.
2. Configure the external load balancer to distribute client connections across the two (or more) data store servers.
3. Configure access to the data store data as described in Setting-up-and-sharing-a-data-store. Ensure that the same path is available for the data store on the redundant configurations.
4. Ensure that each potential provisioning client at the site has access to the load-balanced virtual IP address (VIP) for SMB and HTTP services.
5. Implement a strategy for synchronizing the data on all of the data store servers.

To provide high availability for the data store server without using a load balancer, consider the following alternative approaches:

• Use an existing network attached storage (NAS) solution enabled for high availability. The NAS must be capable of presenting data through SMB and HTTP protocols. An example is the NetApp FAS family of filers.
• Implement a traditional high availability active/standby cluster by using software such as the Veritas Cluster Server.