SiteMinder Disaster Recovery using Load Balancer

Products

• SITEMINDER
• CA Single Sign On Agents (SiteMinder)
• CA Single Sign On Federation (SiteMinder)
• CA Single Sign On Secure Proxy Server (SiteMinder)

Issue/Introduction

Customer has two different environments in two different sites and we would like to know if we can leverage on the two sites for disaster recovery for each other.

Environment

Release : 12.8.07

Resolution

Yes that is possible.

{LoadBalancer} ---+----> ENV1/ENV2 DR
                  |          ^
                  |  replication of stores
                  |          v
                  +----> ENV2/ENV1 DR
 

The replication is not done by siteminder but at the store(such as the policy store, key store, session store and user store) level so it would be transparent to siteminder.

But some customers want to cut over to DR completely with assurance the DR will be functional so they break the replication and do it manually(via scheduled task) at regular interval(running xpsexport -xb %date-policystore.xml on a daily basis).

That is to cover the use case where the policy store corruption is causing the outage.

If the policy store is replicated then the corrupted data will also be present in the DR which breaks DR functionality.

 

Realtime replication is the most used but manual replication is also not rare.