CA SiteMinder® Federation Standalone Guide › Failover Support for Federation System › How to Configure Failover › Set up Failover at Each Federation System

Set up Failover at Each Federation System

To enable failover in a federation deployment, a primary and a secondary CA SiteMinder® Federation Standalone system must be installed and configured.

For SSL-enabled failover environments, follow the instructions to enable SSL for a failover environment.

Important! For Solaris platforms, treat Solaris zones as phyical machines. Install and configure separate CA SiteMinder® Federation Standalone instances in each zone. CA SiteMinder® Federation Standalone does not support failover from one zone to another for a single instance because the zones have different Host IDs.

Follow these steps:

1. Install the product on each system, specifying the same Federation Administrator Password for each installation.

   Note: The product can run in standalone or proxy mode, but the primary and secondary server must use the same mode.

2. Run the federation system Configuration wizard on each system using the same database information for both systems.
3. Log in to the Administrative UI.
4. From the Infrastructure tab, select System Settings.
5. Change the Global Base URL to include the host and port of the proxy server or load balancer in your federated network. Setting this URL helps ensure that the default URL for all entities in any partnership is correct.

   If CA SiteMinder® Federation Standalone uses more than one virtual host or domain, modify the server.conf file to include all entries.

   To modify the server.conf file

   1. Navigate to federation_install_dir/secure-proxy/proxy-engine/conf.
   2. Open the server.conf file in an editor.
   3. Go to the # Default Virtual Host section.
   4. Add the base URL to the hostnames setting using fully qualified host names, as follows:

      <VirtualHost name="default">

      hostnames="defaultbaseurl.example.com:80, newbaseurl.example.com:80"

      </VirtualHost>

      Note: Specify multiple host_name:port entries for the hostnames setting, separating each entry with a comma.

      Example:

      <VirtualHost name="default"

      hostnames=lb5.example.com:80

      </VirtualHost>

Both CA SiteMinder® Federation Standalone systems are pointing to the same database. A proxy server or load balancer can be set up to failover from the primary system to the secondary.

More information:

How to Run the CA SiteMinder® Federation Standalone Installation