Cisco Nexus 1100 Series High Availability - Cisco Nexus 1110-S Deployment Manual

Cisco Nexus 1100 Series High Availability

To achieve high availability, you should deploy redundant Cisco Nexus 1100 Series appliances, with one Cisco
Nexus 1100 Series VSA as the primary device, and the second Cisco Nexus 1100 Series VSA as the secondary
device. The two appliances run in an active-standby configuration to offer high availability for both management
and VSB deployments. Certain virtual services, such as Cisco NAMs, do not support high availability. Please refer
to the documentation for the particular Cisco VSB to determine whether the VSB supports high availability. Figure 3
shows the built-in high availability for both the Cisco VSMs and VSGs.
Figure 3. Cisco Nexus 1100 Series High-Availability Pair
If one Cisco Nexus 1100 Series VSA fails, management automatically fails over to the other Cisco Nexus 1100
Series VSA without disruption of traffic or operations. For two Cisco Nexus 1100 Series appliances to form a high-
availability pair, the control VLAN and domain ID of both Cisco Nexus 1100 Series appliances must match.
Another high-availability feature built into the Cisco Nexus 1100 Series is the capability of the Cisco Nexus VSA
Manager to automatically distribute the placement of the active VSBs across the two appliances. This feature helps
balance the distribution of traffic and reduce the size of the potential fault domain.
The pairing of the Cisco Nexus 1100 Series appliances must match the hardware platform. A Cisco Nexus 1100
Series VSA must be paired with another identical Cisco Nexus 1100 Series platform; mixing of platforms is not
supported, such as mixing a Cisco Nexus 1110-S with a Cisco Nexus 1110-X.
Not every VSB is the primary module on the primary Cisco Nexus 1100 Series VSA. With connectivity between the
primary and secondary Cisco Nexus 1100 Series VSA, access through a serial connection to any virtual service is
maintained. When one Cisco Nexus 1100 Series VSA fails, the remaining Cisco Nexus 1100 Series VSA becomes
active, and all virtual services in the standby state on that Cisco Nexus 1100 Series VSA become active
automatically.
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 7 of 39