On-Premise Dual Server HA Installations

 

Enterprises capable of meeting demands for 24/7 availability, whether On-Premise or Private Cloud, must be prepared to handle different loads and different failures with minimal or no downtime. To avoid unscheduled downtimes, high availability databases are used. These databases are configured in such a way that single points of failure (SPOF) are eliminated and the databases are optimized to ensure that the end user does not experience an interruption in service or a degradation in user experience on hardware or network failure. In short, HA is continuously operational or which provides at least 99.9% uptime.

As compared to a relational database, High Availability database architecture design is generally easy, less complex and ensures high availability in a multiple node and cluster environment. Based on a masterless architecture that uses clustering, with multiple servers grouped together, any server within a cluster can respond to read or write requests. Data replication is achieved across all servers in the cluster to provide system redundancy and to minimize downtime possibility.

 

Customers who require optimal operational performance, even at times of high loads, VIDIZMO offers a configuration based on a Highly Available architecture with the following components:

 

- Application, Content Provider and Encoder

In the configuration below, VIDIZMO Application, the Content Provider, and the Encoder are all installed on the dedicated servers making the application highly available.

 

All of the media types are associated with the content providers. Using a local CDN, the content provider is VIDIZMO which will store, encode and serve the content to the end users. In some cases, for instance, document or image might not need the same storage or encoding provider as that of audio and video files since a user might require different renditions of audio and video files. Therefore, the content providers are selected according to the media file being uploaded.

 

By default, VIDIZMO uses Microsoft Azure as its primary content provider for SaaS models but for On-Premise deployments, VIDIZMO can be configured as the content provider.

 

- Database

SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition AlwaysOn Availability Groups brings SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery to a whole new level by allowing multiple copies of the database be highly available and potentially using them for read-only workloads and offloading management tasks such as backups. AlwaysOn Availability Groups allow you to fail over a group of databases as a single entity. This is very useful for applications that access multiple databases in a single SQL Server instance.

 

The SQL High Availability Group is made up of Databases creating redundancy with each other using the Directory Services and a File Witness Server.

 

 

- Network Storage

When setting up a Streaming Server in VIDIZMO, content storage location needs to be defined which can either be a local drive or a network location. In an on-premise HA configuration, VIDIZMO recommends using any fast and secure Network Storage (SAN/NAS) which can be mapped to a drive for VIDIZMO to store content. Network Storage is an efficient way to manage storage, disaster recovery, and availability as in our case, as a Highly Available storage.

 

- Single Sign-On (SSO)

This is the customer's Identity Provider which integrates with the Web component of VIDIZMO.

 

VIDIZMO supports industry standard implementations of SSO that works with widely used Corporate Authentication services such as Directory and Federation Services, Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions, as well as 3rd Party Login services using industry standard protocols as outlined below. Note that using these options only enables federated login (Authentication) with your VIDIZMO Portal, while Authorization is still handled in VIDIZMO Application. 

 

To learn more about SSO click here on Understanding Single Sign-On (SSO) Options.

To learn more about HA Setup, click here on How To Setup High Availability With VIDIZMO On-Premises/Private Cloud.

 

 

 

On-Premise Dual Server HA VIDIZMO Installation with Network Storage

The deployment model illustrated below uses the components in a High Availability setup using a separate Domain Controller for Directory Services and File Share Witness for the SQL Availability Group to identify which version of the cluster configuration database is the most recent in case of failover.