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SarbjitSinghGill avatar image
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SarbjitSinghGill asked JimmyYang-MSFT commented

Active Active Front End Pool - SfB 2019

Greetings
I am trying to find documentation on this (Active Active Front End Pool) and i am not seeing anything useful i can use.
Almost all content is on Active-Passive Front End Pool setup.

i am trying to understand the pro and cons of active-active vs active-passive.
Anyone with information will be great. Note before posting MS doc url, please read it because almost all points to active-passive. It seems like active-active front end pools are not supported ?

SS

office-skype-business-server-deployment
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JimmyYang-MSFT avatar image
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JimmyYang-MSFT answered JimmyYang-MSFT commented

Hi @SarbjitSinghGill

Yes, you're right. Skype for Business Server supports AlwaysOn Availability Groups only as active/passive, not active/active.

Based on my research, Active-active clusters give you access to the resources of all your servers during normal operation. In an active-passive cluster, the backup server only sees action during failover. This is the main difference between them.


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Greetings @JimmyYang-MSFT , thank you for the reply.

Your reply seems to be talking about the backend SfB servers, aka the DB servers.
I am referring to the front end server pool.

So going back to the front end server pools, is there active-active front end server pool ? e.g. pool1 in site A and pool2 in site B. Instead of a active passive disaster recovery setup, i would want both site to be active-active.

Assuming my implementation has 30,000 users and I will want to have 15,000 users on each front end pool and both pools are active.


SS

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@SarbjitSinghGill

For front end pool, it seems no problem. I found blog talking about how to deploy Active-Active front end pools, you could read the part 2.

Note: Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. The sites are not controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot make any representations regarding the quality, safety, or suitability of any software or information found there. Please make sure that you completely understand the risk before retrieving any suggestions from the above link.


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Thank you and noted.
The blog is for Lync. Is that application for Sfb Server 2019 ?

So in a front end pool active active, let's say Pool A and Pool B are both active. When one of this pool is down, is there an impact on the users on the Active pool which is still up ?

Thank You
Sarbjit Singh

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Hi @SarbjitSinghGill

Yes, it can also applied for Skype for Business Server.

No matter active-active or active-passive, it is essential that 85% of the servers are up and running. If fewer servers are running, the services might be stuck in the starting state and the pool might not start.

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Noted. Okay one more question, 85% in each pool or total 85% out of both pools ?

The plan is to spread the users on two active active front end pools, 12.5K on each pool. So when one pool goes down (and both pools are in active active mode), the users from the failed pool will move over the running pool

SS

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Noted.

What if one pool is completely down and the other pool is 100% up? Will the users from the failed pool be moved to the pool that is up?

There is just so little content on docs@Microsoft on Active-Active pool and how this should be setup :(

Regards
SS

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Noted.

A valid scenario could be that one of the pool with 12.5K users could be down completely with 0% servers available.
Will the users from this downed pool be moved to the pool which is still up ?

There is very little information on docs@Microsoft on Skype for Business, Active-Active frontend pool setup.

Regards
Sarbjit Singh

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Hi @SarbjitSinghGill

If the pool in one site fails, you can fail over the users from that pool to the pool in the other site, which then serves all the users in both pools. For capacity planning, you should design each pool to be able to handle the workload of all users in both pools in the event of a disaster.

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