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RouteMaster High Availability

RouteMaster 3.0 introduces built-in support for High-Availability (HA) systems, for both baseband routers and – with RouteMaster VR – for NDI routing.

With HA mode, a pair of RouteMaster systems are defined as Main and Backup. The system is designed to give seamless switchover between the two in the event of a failure

Features

Heartbeat Monitoring

The two systems monitor each other’s health via a heartbeat, and the backup system automatically starts if the main system should fail. Detection of failure takes just a few seconds, and the complete handover to the backup router takes around ten seconds. Heartbeat monitoring means there’s no need for operator intervention in the case of routing system failure.

Settings Synchronization

Configuration settings are automatically synchronized between the two systems, without the need for external shared storage or manually copying files.

Floating IP Address

Each system has a unique IP address, but an additional IP address automatically ‘floats’ between the two systems. This means the active system can always be reached from a single address, regardless of which system is currently ‘live’. This removes the need for client systems to explicitly support a ‘fallback’ address

NDI Support

With NDI video and RouteMaster VR, the ‘state’ of the virtual routing matrix is held inside RouteMaster. This state is automatically synchronized between the two systems. Also, RouteMaster VR is optimized to support NDI Device Aliasing, where two independent systems can have identical names for NDI streams, as long as both are not simultaneously active.

Requirements

  • Naturally, you need two separate PCs  for the main and backup systems.
  • Each of the two RouteMaster systems requires its own license.
  • RouteMaster must be installed as a Windows service on each machine.
  • The TCP ports for the service REST API must match.
  • Systems must have fixed IP addresses on the same subnet.
  • Both systems must run the same version of RouteMaster

Installation

On both systems, RouteMaster must be installed as a Windows service. The TCP port chosen for the configuration API must be the same on both systems. The RouteMaster installer allows you to select this mode and configure the port.

Configuration

You should start by configuring the MAIN system. If you’re adding HA to an existing installation, all your router and client configuration should be already configured. If not, you should get system working correctly as a standalone system before trying to enable HA mode.

Configuration of HA mode is done using RouteMaster’s Web Interface. You should check that this is enabled and configured from the RouteMaster front-end, accessed as “RouteMaster (Service)” from the Windows Start menu.

Once that’s enabled, the Web Interface menu item allows you to connect to RouteMaster in your browser. Select the High Availability tab.

Enter the IP addresses of the two systems, enable HA mode. Enter a  floating IP address if required, then save the settings. If you’re using DHCP to allocate IP addresses, ensure the floating address you’ve specified won’t accidentally be used by other equipment on your network.

All IP addresses need to be on the same subnet.

Follow the same steps to configure the backup system. You don’t need to worry about the router and client configurations as they will automatically sync from the main system.

Configuration for NDI

The HA module also works with NDI routing. For this to work correctly, you should use NDI Discovery Server rather than rely on mDNS discovery.

Both main and backup routers need to have the same Machine Name (also called an ‘NDI alias’) – this can be set in the Web Interface in the configuration for NDI Routers. This means the router outputs from both machines will have the same name.

Operation

In normal operation, the MAIN system will be running and receiving commands from client systems. If the BACKUP system detects the main system is not running, it will start running, and assign the floating IP address to itself.

Once backup detects that main has recovered, it will stop running, and release the floating IP.

Manually starting or stopping the backup system when HA is enabled is not recommended, as the backup will continue to track the state of the main system and react accordingly. If you need to stop both systems, disable HA mode on the backup system first.

The status of both systems in the HA pair can be monitored from the Status page of the web interface on either main or backup.

  1. The banner of the Web Interface shows which system you’re looking at.
  2. The status of the main machine is shown.
    • Online: System is responding to heartbeat.
    • Offline : System is not responding to heartbeat
    • Running: RouteMaster is  RUNNING
    • Stopped:  RouteMaster is not RUNNING
  3. The status of the backup machine is shown. (The IP address can be clicked on to navigate to this system’s web UI)
  4. Shown if the system owns the floating IP address
  5. Information about settings and state synchronization