Alternate Gatekeepers - TANDBERG Gatekeeper User Manual

TANDBERG Gatekeeper User Manual
Figure 4: Adding a new zone

3.6 Alternate Gatekeepers

Alternate Gatekeeper support is provided to increase the reliability of your deployment. If one
Gatekeeper becomes unavailable, perhaps due to a network or power outage, another will be
used as an Alternate. Alternates share responsibility for their endpoint community: an individual
endpoint may be registered with any one of the Alternates. You should configure Alternates
identically for all registration and call features such as authentication, bandwidth control and
policy. If you do not do this, endpoint behavior will vary unpredictably depending on which
Alternate it is currently registered with. Alternates should also be deployed on the same LAN
as each other so that they may be configured with the same routing information such as local
domain names and local domain subnet masks.
Each Gatekeeper may be configured with the IP addresses of up to five Alternates. When an
endpoint registers with the Gatekeeper, it is presented with the IP addresses of all the Alternates.
If the endpoint loses contact with its initial Gatekeeper, it will seek to register with one of the
Alternates. This may result in your endpoint community's registrations being spread over all the
Alternates.
When a Gatekeeper receives a Location Request, if it cannot respond from its own registration
database, it will query all of its Alternates before responding. This allows the pool of registrations
to be treated as if they were registered with a single Gatekeeper.
The Alternate Gatekeepers can be configured within the web interface of the Gatekeeper by
navigating to Gatekeeper Configuration Gatekeeper. Please see Figure 5 for a screenshot of
a sample configuration.
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