Deploying the SBC on Cloud Infrastructures in HA Mode

The Oracle Communications Session Border Controller (SBC) supports High Availability (HA) deployments on public clouds using the redundancy mechanisms native to those clouds.

If you are deploying on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), you can enable the SBC's native, more efficient GARP-based HA. To use this method:

1. Open a Support Ticket for your OCI tenancy.
2. At the direction of your Oracle Support representative, disable the OCIHAClient SPL plugin.

   ORACLE# configure terminal
   ORACLE(configure)# system spl-config
   ORACLE(spl-config)# sel
   ORACLE(spl-config)# plugins
   ORACLE(spl-plugins)# name OCIHAClient.1.0.spl
   ORACLE(spl-plugins)# state disabled
   ORACLE(spl-plugins)# done

3. Save and activate your configuration.

On all other cloud infrastructures (or on OCI with GARP-based HA not enabled), you configure the cloud to recognize the SBC. The REST client on the SBC subsequently makes requests to the cloud's Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller for authentication and virtual IP address (VIP) management. While HA configuration across all SBC platforms is similar, public cloud HA configuration fundamentally does not require configuring virtual MAC addresses. This feature supports only IPv4 addressing. The SBC includes a REST client to configure the cloud's SDN controller. The local REST client supports both HTTP and HTTPS, using the former for metadata requests and the latter for other cloud management requests. The SBC does not support using both GARP-based HA and REST-based HA simultaneously.

Vendors manage public clouds using SDN. The SDN controller owns all networking aspects including vNICs, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and so forth. Without the knowledge of the SDN controller, IP addresses cannot be assigned or moved. As a result, the network either drops or ignores GARP traffic. The absence of GARP invalidates the use of HA by the SBC in these networks, therefore requiring alternate HA functionality on the SBC.

The SBC recognizes when it is deployed on these clouds. When it needs to failover, instead of issuing GARP traffic to invoke the transfer of VIPs from one node to another, it uses the cloud's REST API to reconfigure virtual IP addressing.

Cloud configuration and the use of REST is equivalent across the range of public clouds, with vendors using different terminology for similar functions and objects.

Note:

The SBC does not support High Availability (HA) when deployed over Azure.

It is recommended not to configure the boot parameter IP address while deploying OCSBC on public clouds as DHCP gets disabled and no DNS Server is available that results in "could not resolve the host" error while switchover happens.