How to Assign a Backup Lead in your MX7000 Chassis Group

This video show how to assign a Backup Lead chassis in a PowerEdge MX7000 Multi-Chassis Management (MCM) group.

Hello everyone, my name is Brian. I am a Global Support Engineer with Dell who specializes in the MX7000 and other modular platforms. Today we are going to go over how to define a backup lead in an MX7000 chassis group. The reason we would want to do this is because it will add redundancy.

In the event our lead chassis is inaccessible, in that case you can manually promote the backup lead chassis, and you will be able to retain other information like defined VLANs and user accounts, as well as other important information like identity pools. So to begin you wat to log in with chassis administrator rights. Currently I am logged in as root, and this is a two chassis group, and we are on the landing page here.

As of chassis firmware 1.30.00 it will have a warning bar if you do not have a backup lead configured. In order to start the process we drop down the ‘Group Configuration’ and select ‘Edit Backup Lead Settings’. You can define which backup you would like to have out of the members that are currently discovered in your group. We only have one other chassis so we're going to choose this as a backup.

You can also Define the backup sync failure alert timeout. Default is ‘30’, I would suggest leaving it at 30 unless you have a strong reason why you would want to change this. You also have the option to define a lead virtual IP address. This is a common commonly accessible IP address that you can access both the lead and the backup with.

Once you define your backup and your virtual IP address, if you would like, you can hit ‘Finish’, and it will have a pop-up stating that the settings have been successfully changed. If you would like to monitor the job for this you can go to ‘Monitor’ and ‘Jobs’. There will be a couple of jobs. One is to update the multi-chassis management group, and the other one is to assign the backup lead itself.

In a two chassis group this top one will take about a minute, and the assigned backup lead will take a little over two minutes to complete. For brevity I will go ahead and pause this. Okay and we're back, so both of these jobs successfully completed.

As we go to the ‘View Details’ of each job you can see that the initial one took a little a little less than a minute to complete and the other one that backs up your system settings took about two minutes and 30 seconds to complete. Initiates the communication, it defines who's going to be a backup, it synchronizes your system settings and it does a short check afterwards.

The last step is to wait until the two databases are properly synchronized. If you go to the chassis landing page you have a backup sync status here. As this becomes green check mark box you will know that the synchronization has successfully completed. I'll go ahead and pause this as this can take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes depending on your chassis group size.

So the backup synchronization status completed successfully as signified by this green check. I do want to call out that you may receive a warning message stating that the backup chassis is unable to communicate because of internal issues. This happens because the check for the synchronization happens much faster than the actual synchronization for defining a backup lead chassis.

As you can see above, it will eventually provide the messaging that the chassis redundancy is restored. So as long as you see this latest message, and we have a green check mark box we know that the backup synchronization was successful and we have an actively defined backup lead. I hope this was informative and helpful.

Thank you for watching.