Managing Secondary Connection Brokers

Enabling or disabling a secondary Connection Broker

To enable or disable a secondary Connection Broker in a Site, select it in the Connection Brokers list and then select or clear the check box at the beginning of the row.

Changing the secondary Connection Broker priority

Each secondary Connection Broker is given a priority. To change the priority, select a secondary Connection Broker 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 Connection Broker to primary

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

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

Configuring auto-promotion

If the primary Connection Broker goes offline, you will need to promote a secondary Connection Broker 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> > Connection Brokers.
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 Connection Broker 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 Connection Broker 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 Connection Broker 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 Connection Broker.

Please also note that auto-promotion must be disabled if you have a single Site with Connection Brokers split across different locations with bad WAN links. If there's no link between Connection Broker located remotely, the third Connection Broker 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 Connection Broker has been promoted to primary.
• Auto-promotion of a secondary Connection Broker has failed.
• Auto-promotion failback completed.

Deleting a secondary Connection Broker

To delete a secondary Connection Broker, select it in the list and then click Delete in the Tasks drop-down list.