Milestone XProtect Advanced VMS 2014 - Manual (Page 224)

Milestone XProtect ® Advanced
VMS 2014
Administrator's Manual
www.milestonesys.com 224 Feature configuration
Feature configuration
Failover recording servers (regular and hot standby)
About failover recording servers
A failover recording server is an extra recording server which takes over from a normal recording
server if this becomes unavailable. You can configure a failover recording server in two ways, as a
regular failover recording server or as a hot standby server.
You install failover recording servers like regular recording servers. Once you have installed failover
recording servers, they are visible in the Management Client. You should install all failover recording
servers on separate computers. Make sure that you configure failover recording servers with the
correct IP address/hostname of the management server and that you verify that the user account
under which the Failover Server service runs has access to your system with administrator rights.
You can specify what type of failover support you want on device-level. For each device on a
recording server, select full, live only or no failover support. This helps you prioritize your failover
resources and, for example, only set up failover for video and not for audio, or only have failover on
essential cameras, not on less important ones.
Regular failover servers
In a regular failover recording server setup, you can group a failover recording server with other
failover recording servers in a failover group. The entire failover group is dedicated to taking over from
any of several preselected recording servers, should one of these become unavailable.
A failover group can contain one or more regular failover recording servers. Grouping has a clear
benefit: when you later specify which failover recording servers should take over from a recording
server, you select a group of failover recording servers. If the selected group contains more than one
failover recording server, this offers you the security of having more than one failover recording server
ready to take over if a recording server becomes unavailable. You can create as many failover groups
as needed group them as needed. A failover recording server can only be a member of one group at a
time.
Failover recording servers in a failover group are ordered in sequence. This sequence determines in
which order the failover recording servers should take over from a recording server. By default, this
sequence reflects the order in which you have incorporated the failover recording servers have in the
failover group: first in is first in sequence. You can change this if you need to.
Hot standby failover recording servers
In a hot standby recording server setup, you can dedicate a failover recording server to take over from
one recording server only. Because of this, the system can keep this failover recording server in a
"standby" mode which means that it already starts with the correct/current configuration of the
recording server it is dedicated to and can take over faster than a regular failover recording server. As
mentioned, you assign hot standby servers to one recording server only and cannot group it. You
cannot select to use failover servers that are already part of a failover group as hot standby recording
servers.