Managing Secondary Publishing Agents

Enabling or disabling a secondary Publishing Agent

To enable or disable a secondary Publishing Agent in a Site, select it in the Publishing Agents list and then select or clear the check box at the beginning of the row.

Changing the secondary Publishing Agent priority

Each secondary Publishing Agent is given a priority. To change the priority, select a secondary Publishing Agent and use the "Up arrow" and "Down arrow" icons (or Tasks > Move up, Move down) to move it up or down the list. The higher the agent is in the list, the higher the priority.

Promoting a secondary Publishing Agent to primary

If the primary Publishing Agent cannot be recovered, you can promote a secondary Publishing Agent to primary as follows:

1. Open the RAS Console on the Publishing Agent server that you would like to promote (all required files are automatically installed when a server is added to a Site as a secondary Publishing Agent).
2. Select the Farm category and navigate to the Publishing Agents node.
3. Select the Publishing Agent and then click Tasks > Promote to primary.
4. Click OK once the process is finished.

Configuring auto-promotion

If the primary Publishing Agent goes offline, you will need to promote a secondary Publishing Agent to take its place. The auto-promotion feature can do it automatically after a specified time period.

By default, auto-promotion is turned off. To enable it, do the following:

1. In the RAS Console, navigate to Farm > <Site> > Publishing Agents.
2. Select the Auto-promotion tab in the right pane.
3. Select the Enable auto-promotion option and specify the time period after which the next secondary Publishing Agent should be promoted to primary. The time period can be set between 15 minutes and 72 hours (the default value is 30 min).
4. Select the Enable failback option if you want the original Publishing Agent to become primary again should it go back online. For the Licensing Site, this eliminates license activation if failback happens within 72 hours. The license activation countdown is always displayed in the RAS Console, so the administrator can check if the original primary Publishing Agent recovers within this time period or not. If the original agent goes back online after the 72-hour period (and if the Farm has been already reactivated), it will become a secondary Publishing Agent.

Note: To enable auto-promotion, you need at least three active Publishing Agents in a Site. If you have less than three, the auto-promotion is ignored.

Please also note that auto-promotion must be disabled if you have a single Site with Publishing Agents split across different locations with bad WAN links. If there's no link between Publishing Agent located remotely, the third Publishing Agent acts as a witness to prevent split-brain.

When auto-promotion takes place, the RAS administrator will receive notifications via email about the following events:

• A secondary Publishing Agent has been promoted to primary.
• Auto-promotion of a secondary Publishing Agent has failed.
• Auto-promotion failback completed.

Deleting a secondary Publishing Agent

To delete a secondary Publishing Agent, select it in the list and then click Delete in the Tasks drop-down menu.