Thycotic Management Server High Availability

The Thycotic Management Server (TMS) allows organizations to manage all of their endpoints from a single web console.

To facilitate this centralized management, the TMS has High Availability and Load Balancing features, so that there is no single point of failure within the product.

There are two components that make up the TMS:

• Web front end
• SQL database back end

Web front end

Using Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), the web front end provides the communication channel between the server, clients and the web console that allows users to administer the system over HTTP or HTTPS.

A single TMS installation can have more than one web front end server. The benefits of having multiple front ends are:

• Redundancy - if a server fails, then the other servers in the cluster will take over without any interruption to clients
• Load Balancing - during normal operation the client traffic is distributed across all nodes in the cluster

Load Balancing

Client-to-server communication with the TMS platform is sessionless, which greatly reduces the complexity of setting up load balancing. 

You can distribute network traffic between the nodes using a variety of methods: 

• DNS round robin - very simple to setup and requires minimal configuration, the load is balanced evenly between cluster nodes. Requires manually removing a failed node from the cluster.
• Network Load Balancing (NLB) - a component of Windows Server operating systems that allows multiple IIS servers to appear as one. Using NLB provides greater control over how the load can be balanced and provides for detection of failed nodes which can be automatically removed from the cluster.
• Hardware based appliance - provides the highest level of reliability but requires more work setting up the initial configuration.

TMS provides REST API's that can be utilised to determine a node's health so that automatic fail over is possible.

Encryption

The client-to-server communication channel is encrypted using SSL, which requires that all nodes in the web front end cluster have a SSL certificate installed. Nodes within the cluster MUST share the same certificate as the private key is used to encrypt server-to-client messages; the load balancer can terminate the SSL connections and communicate with the web front end nodes using normal HTTP, thereby freeing up CPU resources. 

SQL database back end

TMS supports the use of SQL server clusters for High Availability scenarios. We support all cluster types including stretch clusters, however the latency between the web front end and each SQL cluster node must be no greater than 30 ms. TMS also supports SQL Server fail over cluster configurations. Note that an active/active configuration does not provide improved performance, just high availability.

Some customers have chosen to deploy a single stand-alone instance for production with the database mirroring to a second stand-alone DR instance that can also be used for reporting. This type of configuration requires manually cutting over in a failure scenario, but allows the second SQL server to be actively used instead of sitting underutilised.