Failover recording servers (explained)

Available functionality depends on the system you are using. See Product comparison chart for more information.

A failover recording server is an extra recording server which takes over from the standard recording server if this becomes unavailable. You can configure a failover recording server in two modes, as a cold standby server or as a hot standby server.

You install failover recording servers like standard recording servers. Once you have installed failover recording servers, they are visible in the Management Client. Milestone recommends that you 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.

Important: While your system is in failover mode, you are unable to multicast, replace or move hardware, update the recording server, or change device configurations such as storage settings or video stream settings.

Cold standby failover recording servers

In a cold standby failover recording server setup, you group multiple failover recording servers in a failover group. The entire failover group is dedicated to take over from any of several preselected recording servers, if one of these becomes unavailable. You can create as many groups as you want.

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 specify a secondary failover server group that takes over from the primary group if all the recording servers in the primary group are busy. 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 a sequence. The sequence determines the order in which the failover recording servers will take over from a recording server. By default, the sequence reflects the order in which you have incorporated the failover recording servers in the failover group: first in is first in the sequence. You can change this if you need to.

Hot standby failover recording servers

In a hot standby failover recording server setup, you 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 is synchronized with the correct/current configuration of the recording server it is dedicated to and can take over much faster than a cold standby failover recording server. As mentioned, you assign hot standby servers to one recording server only and cannot group it. You cannot assign failover servers that are already part of a failover group as hot standby recording servers.

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