Geneos - Gateway - Hot Standby Licensing and Setup Recommendation

Do I need a separate licence for my backup gateway? No. Your primary and secondary gateway can connect to one licence daemon which uses one licence.

We do not issue separate licences for the secondary gateway in a hot standby pair. Both the primary and secondary gateway can connect to the same licence daemon, which reads from one licence file. A gateway caches licences from successful requests to a licence daemon, so if the licence daemon fails the gateway will continue to run and monitoring is not impacted. Only specific changes can be made – rules can be added / amended however changes like adding monitoring cannot be made and will be ignored.

There are 3 recommended ways to have your licence daemon set up, both of which involve having it running on the same host as one of the gateways:

1. Run one licence daemon on the main server where the primary gateway is. With this hot standby setup, in the case that the main server fails, the primary gateway and licence daemon would go down, and the secondary gateway will be used. The secondary gateway uses the cached licence and monitoring is not affected. Configuration changes to the gateway cannot be made. In the alternate scenario, if the secondary gateway server fails, the primary gateway and licence daemon are still up and running.
2. Run one licence daemon on the backup server where the secondary gateway is. If the main server fails, the secondary gateway will be used, and the licence daemon will still be up and running. Configuration changes are possible to be made. When the primary is running again, the gateways will synchronise and the primary will receive the updated setup file before resuming monitoring.
3. Choose to nominate a non gateway host – it is not restricted to a host that runs a gateway

See the following pages in our documentation for more detail:

• Hot Standby (Primary and Secondary Gateways)
• Licence Persistence
• Unavailable Licence Daemon