High Availability - Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Configuration Manual

Cisco RISE Integration Overview

High Availability

In the one-arm mode (see figure below), the Citrix Netscaler Application Delivery Controller (ADC) appliance
is configured with a VLAN that handles both client and server requests.
Figure 1: One-Arm Deployment
High Availability
This section describes the basic redundancy deployments that support the Cisco Remote Integrated Service
Engine (RISE) runtime message handling between a service appliance and the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switch.
A high availability, redundant deployment uses a maximum of two appliances (peers) to support seamless
switchover of flows in case one of the appliances becomes unresponsive.
When the redundancy involves multiple Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches, the switches are considered to be
both in active state (one as primary and the other as secondary). When two RISE-enabled appliances are
connected to two Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches (dedicated), the active appliance is connected to one
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis and the standby appliance is connected to the second chassis. This deployment
ensures that even if one of the switches goes down, there is minimal disruption in the traffic.
NetScaler high availability can be used in conjunction with vPC. vPC is used when an Nexus switch fails,
and NetScaler high availability is there for when a NetScaler fails. A NetScaler HA failover should only be
triggered if one of the NetScalers actually stops functioning. If a Nexus switch fails and there is no vPC it
causes the downstream NetScaler to "fail", but only because it lost connection to its HA peer.
Cisco Remote Integrated Service Engine for Citrix NetScaler Appliances and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches
Configuration Guide
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