High Availability

The LiveTime High Availability, Clustering option is designed for organizations requiring extremely high throughput and fault tolerance for LiveTime Service Manager and Help Desk. By natively supporting cluster management subsystems, load balancing and failover capabilities your service desk will always be available.

High Availability comes in many different forms. The core architecture has been specifically designed with this in mind. LiveTime supports full clustering with multiple nodes (Active – Active Cluster) as well as hot spares (Active – Passive Failover), where only one node is active, providing failover support in cases where the active node is unavailable.

In full clustering mode LiveTime can have an unlimited number of distributed nodes across multiple networks with load sharing based upon the local point of presence or workload of each server. In contrast, hot spares are designed as redundant servers, ready to take over when the logical node fails.

 Active-Passive Failover with LiveTime

Balancing

All client browser requests arrive at the load balancer. The load balancer sends the HTTP requests to a web server using an optimized routing algorithm. The web server applies the clustering functionality to connect to an appropriate application server instance. The application server may also connect to a cluster of replicated database servers.

The LiveTime High Availability option uses web server proxies as the front-end web server to accept all service desk requests. Under this arrangement, the web server performs tasks such as accepting Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests and decrypting Secure Socket Layer (SSL) requests etc. Based on a weighted round robin algorithm using sticky sessions, the web server passes the request onto the appropriate application server running an instance of the LiveTime application.

Advantages

  • Increase Performance up to 10x.
    LiveTime High Availability automatically caches frequently accessed data across multiple instances to dramatically improve service desk response times.
  • High Availability and Failover.
    LiveTime High Availability uses server affinity (sticky sessions) to replicate session data to ensure the delivery of an always-on, high availability service desk solution.
  • Optimized database access.
    LiveTime High Availability scales vertically and horizontally, and the automatic caching drastically minimizes the amount of traffic between the database and the application server.