Server Farm and Switchover Considerations

In addition to the standard reverse proxy configurations, some installations use a switchover CIC server pair. To route interactions if the primary server goes down, the reverse proxy must know what the two servers are in this switchover pair. The following section describes how to configure the reverse proxy to connect to the switchover pair.

URL Rewrite with Server Farm

First, create a Server Farm to point to both servers.

1. To open the IIS Manager, in the Run dialog box, run the command inetmgr.

2. Right-click the Server Farms section and select Create Server Farm.

3. Enter a name for the server farm and select Next.

4. Add the corresponding IP addresses for the two CIC servers.

5. If the SMS broker does not use port 80 or port 443, click Advanced Settings and change the port number.

6. Select Finish and make sure the system creates a URL rewrite for the server farm.

   Result: There is a new URL rewrite that uses the server farm as the server we are going to send it to, as in the following example:

Health Test for Server Farm

The URL now routes to the specific server in question now, but there is no check to determine if ServerA or ServerB is the primary. To get around this, use a health check that points to the SMS path. The SMSServer will respond to the HTTP request (however there will be no SMS created since the information will be incorrect).

To set up the health check:

1. Select the container for the server farm that was created.

2. The features for that farm will be displayed, double-click Health Test.

3. Input the SMS URL to send the Health Test to.

   Note:

   See the screenshot for an example for a specific broker. Use the appropriate URL for your SMS broker.

   Starting in IC 4.0 SU6, adding the parameter healthcheckignore=1 to the end of the URL suppresses certain error messages in logging that occur when SMSServer receives an invalid URL for an SMS.

4. Click Apply.

Verification for Health Test

This option attempts to send a fake SMS message to the SMS server. However, the SMS server sends a response back indicating that it is alive. The Verify URL Test button can be selected in order to determine if the URL is working. Here is an example of what you should see:

In this example, this URL test indicates that 10.101.60.9 is the active server in the switchover pair and 10.101.24.50 is the backup server. Any HTTP messages sent to this server are redirected to the 10.101.60.9 server and not the backup.