Security

I'm looking to promote my standby publisher to the active publisher in my 6.7.5 cluster and needed some clarification on a few things. They are both 25K hardware appliances, upgraded to be C3000's. In previous posts I've seen concerns about licensing getting deactived, but now with 6.7 the licenses aren't tied to the box anymore, so wasn't sure if it's still a concern. I'm also looking for a rough estimate on how long the actual promotion will take - we have 9 servers in the cluster today and are doing wired/wireless 802.1X, guest, admin access (tacacs/radius), and network profiling.

I'm trying to plan a maintenance window and not sure what to expect.

For added insight - the subscriber was the publisher before a power failure. The subscriber was rebuilt due to corrupted file system. The current publisher used to be the standby, but has been running as active since that event.

Thanks.

I did this on a small test environment. I had two nodes with one with less diskspace to upgrade to 6.8. So i decide to make my subcriber the publischer. It was done in some minutes but dont no how long it takes in a large environment. After that i removed and re-image the subscriper node on bigger drives and join the cluster again. I dont had any issues with the licences, your AC,OG,OB licences are shared in the cluster on 6.7. Only the platform licence is per node, but that is allready installed in your case ;)

-EDIT-

In my HomeLAB is taked 2 minutes. See below the steps in de process.

Promoting subscriber node to publisher...
INFO - Checking cluster connectivity
INFO - Temporarily pausing replication on all nodes...
INFO - Trying to bring all nodes to sync...
INFO - Transfering ownership from node with management IP=172.16.200.2
INFO - Switching local node to publisher
INFO - Switching replication on other nodes to replicate from this
node
INFO - 172.16.200.2: - Subscriber now replicating from publisher
172.16.200.3
INFO - Subscription ownership changed to node with management
IP=172.16.200.3
INFO - Restoring replication setup...
INFO - 172.16.200.3 is now setup as the publisher
Node promoted to Publisher

Thanks for the info! I'll plan an hour maintenance window just to be safe. The other question I had, will it affect authentications during the promotion? For the most part, the one becoming publisher isn't doing many authentications at all, the one becoming subscriber is. Guest is anonymous login, so no guest account creation and we don't use OB or OG.

Authentications should be go on.

1. Please first ALWAYS! backup your database configuration
2. Disable cluster wide parameters > standby publisher > Enable Publisher Failover > FALSE
3. "WARNING: All application licenses will be de-activated. Please contact support to re-activate these licenses" (not happende in my case with trial licenses). But if happens call TAC...They are fast ;)