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May 28, 2019
HomeDatacenter networking & securityActive-Active Data Center Design


ACTIVE-ACTIVE DATA CENTER DESIGN

By Muhammad Marakkoottathil Datacenter networking & security  17 Comments
Active-Active Data Center design – High Level Architectural Building Blocks

Defining an active-active data-center strategy is not an easy task when you talk
to network, server & compute teams who usually do not collaborate when it comes
to planning their infrastructure. Most importantly, active-active data Center
design requires end-to-end technology stack working together cohesively. It
usually needs an enterprise-level architecture drive to establish the idea.
Moreover, it really means to provide availability and traffic load sharing of
applications across DC’s with the following key use cases

 * Business Continuity
 * Mobility and load sharing
 * Consistent policy and fast provisioning capability across


ACTIVE-ACTIVE DATA-CENTER TECHNICAL REQUIREMENT:

Below are the generic technical requirements to be considered when formulating
the active-active datacenter design.

Active-Active Data center design – Technical Requirement Summary

In Addition to the above, the followings are the major building blocks and
associated considerations to make during active-active data center design


ACTIVE-ACTIVE TRANSPORT TECHNOLOGIES

Clearly, transport technologies are the interconnectors of the datacenters.
Links and device-level redundancies are part of the transport domain which
provides HA & resiliency across the site, This could include redundancy for
multiplexers, GPONs, DCI network devices, dark fibers, and diversity POPs for
surviving POP failure and 1+1 protection schemes for devices, card, and link,
etc.

Furthermore, below list contains, the major considerations to make when
designing a transport solution to interconnect data centers

 * Recover from various type of failure scenarios: Link failure, module
   failures, and node failure, etc
 * Link latency and  applications round trip requirements for the traffic
   between DC’s
 * Bandwidth requirements and associated scalability factors


ACTIVE-ACTIVE NETWORK SERVICES

Indeed, network services interconnect all the devices in the data centers by
performing required traffic switching and routing functions. The network should
facilitate the forwarding of application traffic & load sharing without any
disruption. And also application mobility across the data-centers by providing
the pervasive gateway, L2 extension, and ingress and egress path optimization.
Furthermore, it is good to note, most of the major network vendor’s SDN solution
currently provides integrated VxLAN overlay solution to achieve L2 extension,
path optimization, and gateway mobility

Also, the following are the major considerations to make when designing
active-active network services

 * Recover from various type of failure scenarios: Link, module and network
   device failure, etc
 * Pervasive Gateway across the infrastructure:  Gateway availability local to
   the DC and across the DC
 * Stretching L2 domain: Able to extend the L2 domain ( VLAN or VxLAN) between
   the DC’s
 * Consistent Policy:  Network policies are consistent across the on-premises
   and also to the various cloud infrastructure – these policies could include
   the naming, segmentation rules for integrating various L4/L7 services and
   hypervisor integration, etc.
 * Path Optimizations: Ingress and egress
 * Centralized Management:  Centralized provisioning of the network policies and
   management (e.g.: Inventory, troubleshooting, AAA capabilities, backup and
   restore, traffic flow analysis and capacity dashboards, etc.)


ACTIVE-ACTIVE L4-L7 SERVICES

Undoubtedly, building active-active L4-L7 services across DC’s is always an
expensive task as it requires placing security and ADC devices in both DC’s.
Importantly global traffic managers, application policy controllers,
load-balancers, and firewalls are the major solutions to consider in this space.
furthermore, these will need to be deployed at a different tier for the
protection of perimeter, extranet, WAN, core server farm, UAT segment, etc. Also
to note, currently most of the leading L4-L7 services vendors offering
clustering solutions of their products across the DC’s. Clustering allows its
members to share the l4/l7 policies, traffic load, and at the same time
providing seamless fail-over in case of issues.

It should be noted, major considerations related to L4-L7 services design are
below

 * Recover from various types of failure scenarios: Link, module, and l4-l7
   device failure, etc.
 * Consistent Policy:  L4-L7 policies are consistent across the on-premises
   infrastructure and also on to the various clouds – this could include the
   naming of the policies, L4-L7 rules for various traffic types, etc.
 * Centralized Management:  Centralized provisioning of the network policies and
   management (e.g.: Inventory, troubleshooting, AAA capabilities, backup and
   restore, traffic flow analysis, capacity dashboards, etc.)


ACTIVE-ACTIVE STORAGE SERVICES 

Definitely, storage and related networking solutions are one of the main pillars
of active-active data center design. Moreover, it means storages in both DC’s
serving applications. similarly, the design should cater to the ability to
accept read and write requests without any interruption. Therefore it is also
important to have real-time data mirroring and seamless fail-over capability
across DC’s.  Some of the major considerations related to storage design are
below

 * Recover from various type of storage failure scenarios such as Single disk,
   storage array and storage controller failure & split-brain scenarios
 * Synchronous vs. asynchronous replication: With Synchronous replication data
   write to primary storage and replica simultaneously. Because of that, it
   consumes more bandwidth and furthermore typically requires using dedicated FC
   links
 * Storage high availability & redundancy: Storage replication factors & number
   of disks available for redundancy etc
 * Storage Network failure scenarios:  Link, module and network device failure,
   etc


ACTIVE-ACTIVE SERVER VIRTUALIZATION

The server virtualization evolved over the years. Most importantly organizations
are even moving to microservices and containers.  The main consideration here is
to extended hypervisor/container clusters across the DC’s to achieve seamless
virtual machine/ container instances movement and fail-over. The dominant
players in this space are VMware Docker and Microsoft. And there are others well
– such as KVM, Kubernetes( Container Management), etc

Below are some of the key considerations when it comes to server virtualization

 * Virtualization platform to form a cross-DC virtual host cluster
 * HA Function to protect the VM, create affinity rules to prefer local hosts in
   normal operational conditions.
 * Deploy the same service on VMs in two DCs so that when host machine
   unavailable, VMs in the other DC can take over the loads in real-time
 * The compute  node devices across the DC’s are provisioned with symmetric
   configuration with required resources for failover
 * Centralized management of computing resources and hypervisor’s


ACTIVE-ACTIVE APPLICATIONS DEPLOYMENT

The infrastructure is built for application to function. Furthermore, it is
important to make sure the high availability of the applications across DCs. And
it can do fail-over and can get location proximity access. The key is to have
the Web, App and DB tiers available at both data-centers, and in case of the
application fails in any of the DC it should allow fail-over and continuity

Follow are the some of the major considerations

 * Deploy the Web services on a virtual machine (VM) or a physical machine, with
   multiple servers forming independent clusters  per DC
 * Deploy the App services on a virtual machine (VM) or a physical machine. With
   multiple servers in the DC forming a cluster, or multiple cross-DC servers
   forming a cluster (Preferably different IP based access – If the application
   supports distributed deployment).
 * Deploy databases preferably on physical machines to form a cross-DC cluster
   (Active- standby or active-active). E.g. : Oracle RAC, DB2, SQL with Windows
   server failover cluster (WSFC)


SUMMARY

The below diagram shows the summary of the active-active data center design
components

Active-active data center design full stack network components

Active-active data-center design requires architecture components of the
network, storage, l4-l7 services, compute, and virtualization and application
components working together. Seamless availability and operation of the business
applications in case of the infrastructure failure in any one of the data-center
is a key factor. And when it comes to cost, operating active-active data centers
are expensive as compared to disaster recovery, but only by about 20% while
delivering 35% more capacity and enabling non-stop operations. This improves
uptime, enhanced performance, and optimum asset utilization

For futher read, I would recommend following Cisco live presentation:
https://www.ciscolive.com/c/dam/r/ciscolive/apjc/docs/2016/pdf/BRKDCT-2615.pdf



Finally, please don’t miss out to read Nutanix Solutions from an architectural
perspective blog


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ABOUT AUTHOR

MUHAMMAD MARAKKOOTTATHIL(MM)

Expert in the field of SDN, cloud computing, virtualization, active-active data
center design & migration. Passionate about helping organizations to achieve
their digital transformation objectives with strong 15+ years of experience in
design, deployment, and managing heterogeneous network solutions across the
industry verticals. Major Industry Certifications: Cisco CCIE, CCDP, VMware
VCAP-NV_DESIGN, TOGAF, ITIL, NUTANIX NCSE, Google Cloud Architect, Azure
Fundamentals More info please visit my page @ LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/contactmm/

17 Comments
    
 1. James
    
    This is one of the comprehensive article on the topic i came across – thanks
    for putting al pieces togethet
    
    June 8, 2019 Reply
     * Muhammad Marakkoottathil
       
       Hi James, thanks for the comments. Yes, the active-active DC discussion
       is aways cross-domain/architectural topic and should have the end to end
       objective in mind when designing it.
       
       June 9, 2019 Reply
       

    
    
 2. eddie nugent
    
    a very well explained topic much appreciate the time and effort in putting
    it together,
    
    October 17, 2019 Reply
     * Muhammad Marakkoottathil
       
       Thank you Eddie
       
       May 26, 2020 Reply
       

    
    
 3. J George
    
    Very Good Stuff Muhammad, great job.
    
    November 7, 2019 Reply
     * Muhammad Marakkoottathil
       
       Thank you, glad to know you like the post
       
       May 26, 2020 Reply
       

    
    
 4. Chaiyasit S.
    
    How to handle latency for interconnect communication between each pair of
    active-standby or active-active databases running different DCs?
    
    June 21, 2020 Reply
     * Muhammad Marakkoottathil
       
       Hi Chaiyasit S. the latency requirement varies based on the scenario. for
       the active-standby, it is ok to have higher latency but during the
       failover, it should be able to cater to the data transfer requirements.
       However, when it comes to an active-active scenario the application
       requirement needs to be considered properly. For example, I know if you
       are stretching oracle across they mandate not more than 10 ms RTT.
       
       https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/12213/wls/WLCAG/weblogic_ca_best_stch.htm#WLCAG-GUID-E5687E48-B57A-49CB-AF2E-E7BF55078D93
       
       -MM-
       
       June 22, 2020 Reply
        * Chaiyasit
          
          Thank you very much
          
          June 24, 2020 Reply
          
    
       
       

    
    
 5. Rajendra Prasad
    
    Hi Muhammad,
    I must say you have beautifully documented your articles.
    
    August 2, 2020 Reply
     * Muhammad Marakkoottathil
       
       Thank you, Rajendra. we will make sure to continue the same and your
       comments are really important for us.
       
       August 7, 2020 Reply
       

    
    
 6. Charanjit Singh
    
    This is a great resource Muhammad. Just when I was looking out for something
    similar. Thank you!
    
    August 7, 2020 Reply
    
 7. Issa
    
    Excelent article
    
    February 11, 2022 Reply
    
 8. Issa
    
    Salam Mohammed, I have some doubts about active-active from storage streched
    cluster side. In many incidnetes it takes both DCs down togather. In which
    it makes it difcult to recover from either data centers. The limittation of
    10MS RT with highr cost of DWDM links adds up. I would have active from the
    software layer but faster recovery from the DR site. DO you recoomend a
    solution? or I just move to Active- Hot standby
    
    February 11, 2022 Reply
    
 9. Rostislav Rusev
    
    This is wrong on so many levels. Stretched DC architecture with multi-layer
    DCIs is a direct abundance of fundamental network design principles.
    
    May 10, 2023 Reply
    
    

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