Security

last person joined: yesterday 

Forum to discuss Enterprise security using HPE Aruba Networking NAC solutions (ClearPass), Introspect, VIA, 360 Security Exchange, Extensions, and Policy Enforcement Firewall (PEF).
Back to discussions
Expand all | Collapse all

CPPM - Authentication requests: load balance or not?

This thread has been viewed 3 times

  • 1.  CPPM - Authentication requests: load balance or not?

    Posted Apr 02, 2019 10:00 AM
    Hi community,

    I have a customer who has purchased two C1000 ClearPass appliances, just for redundancy, so I will create a cluster of two nodes, both if the same L2 segment. The number of users to be authenticated is very small, no more than 200 concurrent users, so the two nodes will be sharing 200 Access licenses. For the wireless side I have a cluster of IAPs. In this case where the number of users is very small and the ClearPass nodes can handle with no problems the authentication requests, is it better if I configure my Instant cluster to load balance the traffic between the two ClearPass nodes (active-active) or to send all the traffic to one node and let the other node as backup in case the primary node fails (active-standby)? Both options will work, which one is better?

    Regards,
    Julián


  • 2.  RE: CPPM - Authentication requests: load balance or not?
    Best Answer

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Apr 02, 2019 10:02 AM

    Active/Standby is much easier to troubleshoot if you don't need to load balance due to "load".  My opinion and my opinion alone.



  • 3.  RE: CPPM - Authentication requests: load balance or not?

    Posted Apr 03, 2019 11:07 AM

    Hi,

     

    And it makes sense, thank you!

     

    Regards,

    Julián



  • 4.  RE: CPPM - Authentication requests: load balance or not?

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Apr 03, 2019 02:17 PM

    If you are planning to use Active/Standby then I would also suggest to configure VIP in ClearPass to control fail-over from ClearPass setup itself.

     

    Regards,

    Pranav



  • 5.  RE: CPPM - Authentication requests: load balance or not?

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Apr 03, 2019 02:28 PM

    The VIP is clearpass is designed for when you can only point the authentication to a single ip address, like redirecting to the Captive Portal page.  The VIP in ClearPass is not necessarily fast to fail over  so load balancing or active/standby in Instant is better suited for high availability than the ClearPass VIP.