Business Continuity

Business Continuity relies on pairs of servers. A pair is composed of regular linked Primary and Back-up SIP Servers. Two SIP Server pairs are considered peers when they support each other in a Business Continuity model. You can specify the name of the preferred connection site and the Business Continuity connection site, and the time-out interval for switch-over to the Business Continuity site.

Note: All Interaction Workspace Business Continuity-related (disaster recovery) options can be configured for any object in the configuration hierarchy (Application, Tenant, Agent Group, and Person).

Use the Procedure: Configuring Interaction Workspace for Business Continuity to enable Business Continuity for your agents. By using that procedure, you specify the site name in the options of the corresponding server application (SIP Servers, Stat Servers and Configuration Servers) in the interaction-workspace section. Use the mandatory disaster-recovery.site option to specify the symbolic name of the site, such as Site X or Site Y. This value is matched against the value specified by the disaster-recovery.preferred-site or disaster-recovery.peer-site options of every agent. Based on the matching results, the server will be either the Business Continuity-Preferred site or the Business Continuity-Peer site for the agent.

• disaster-recovery.site -- Specifies the Business Continuity site name of the server.

The optional disaster-recovery.name option in the interaction-workspace section of the SIP Server objects specifies SIP Server pairs that are peers from the Business Continuity definition (preferred HA pair and peer HA pair). If there are more than two linked peers in Interaction Workspace connection configuration, this option must be configured, and each pair must have the same name configured. When the same "name" value is assigned to two primary SIP Servers, they are considered as Business Continuity peers. If no name is specified, the value default is assumed. For more information about Genesys High-Availability, refer to Framework 8.1 SIP Server High-Availability Deployment Guide. Then, use the following options in the interaction-workspace section of the Interaction Workspace Application object to configure Business Continuity:

• disaster-recovery.enabled -- Specifies whether Business Continuity is enabled.
• disaster-recovery.preferred-site -- Specifies the name of the preferred connection site for the application, tenant, agent Group, or agent. It must correspond to the value of the disaster-recovery.site option on the server object at the preferred site.
• disaster-recovery.peer-site -- Specifies the name of the site that is to be the Business Continuity-peer. It must correspond to the value of the disaster-recovery.site option on the server object at the peer site.
• disaster-recovery.timeout -- Specifies the timeout interval in seconds after loss of connection to the High Availability (HA) Pair of servers and before Business Continuity switchover is initiated.
• disaster-recovery.wait-for-sipphone-timeout -- Specifies the time interval in seconds to wait for SipPhone(SIPEndpoint) registration before initiating the Business Continuity switchover if the current SipPhone(SIPEndpoint) connection was lost or registration was expired.
• disaster-recovery.auto-restore -- Specifies whether or not switching back to the Preferred site should occur if it becomes available.

Note: Places must be configured identically on the Preferred site and the Peer site, and should be linked to the DN that belongs to the SIP Switch at the Preferred site or the Peer site. The Same DR number is used for both sites. Interaction Workspace automatically validates Business Continuity configuration when this feature is enabled.

Optimizing Switchover

To ensure that the switchover from the peer to the preferred site occurs correctly when the preferred site is restored.

The default values for the following configuration options can cause the switchover to the preferred site to be delayed in some environments:

• sipendpoint.proxies.proxy0.reregister_in_seconds=3600
• sipendpoint.proxies.proxy1.reregister_in_seconds=3600

The default values of 3600 seconds means that the first SIP Endpoint re-registration attempt will occur after one hour. In scenarios where the preferred site is returned to service in a few minutes, there is a significant delay between the preferred site being available and the SIP Endpoint attempting to re-register with the preferred site.

You can choose much shorter re-registration attempt intervals by setting the values of these options to a value between 30 and 60 seconds.