Data Center LAN Migration Guide - Juniper Networks

Data Center LAN Migration Guide
Post Installation
As previously noted, procedures similar to those used when installing new security appliances in a single vendor
environment could be used after physical installation is complete. As a best practice:
• Verify access via CLI or network management tools.
• Verify interface status via CLI or network management tools.
• Verify that traffic is passing through the platform.
• Verify that rules are operational and behaving as they should.
• Confirm that Application Layer Gateway (ALG) policies/IPS are stopping anomalous or illegal traffic in the
application layer, while passing permitted traffic.
• Confirm that security platforms are reporting appropriately to a centralized logging or SIEM platform.
Business Continuity and Workload Mobility Trigger Events
Sometimes an improvement in availability of systems to external and internal users drives a critical initiative to enhance
the availability of data center infrastructures, either within an individual data center or between sets of data centers
such as primary, backup, and distributed data center sites. The goal is almost always to preserve a business’ value to its
stakeholders, and it often requires upgrades or extensions to critical infrastructure areas to achieve this goal.
Business continuity or disaster recovery sites can be set up as active/active, warm-standby, or cold-standby
configurations. A cold-standby site could involve an agreement with a provider such as SunGuard in which backup
tapes are trucked to a SunGuard backup data center facility. A warm-standby site could interconnect primary and
standby data centers for resumption of processing after a certain amount of backup/recovery system startup has
occurred. A hot-standby, active/active configuration involves continuously available services running in each site that
allow transparent switching between “primary” and “secondary” as needed, driven by planned or unplanned outages. A
large organization may have instances of each.
Business continuity and workload mobility are tightly coupled. Business continuity or high availability disaster recovery
(HADR) often involves provisioning between two or more data centers. The design could involve replicating an entire
data center (essentially a Greenfield installation), or the design could involve adding additional capacity to one or
more existing data centers. The specific insertion points could be at any of the tiers of an existing three-tier design. We
have already outlined best practices and specific installation tasks for several of these network insertion points in this
chapter. Once provisioning for the disaster recovery data center has been done, users should be able to connect into
any of the data centers transparently.
Since we have already described the installation tasks for access and aggregation/core switching and services tiers
of the new data center network, we won’t repeat those here. The same procedures can be used to enhance the data
center infrastructures that will take part in the HADR system. To the extent that MPLS and VPLS are involved in the
configuration between centers, we will address the steps associated with that part of the network in the section on
workload mobility further on in this guide.
Best Practices Design for Business Continuity and HADR Systems
• Business continuity is enabled using a mix of device-level, link-level, and network-level resiliency within and between
an organization’s data center sites. In most cases, it also involves application and host system resiliency capabilities
that need to interwork seamlessly with the network to achieve continuity across multiple sites.
• In this section, we first concentrate on the network-level design within the data center sites.
• In the following section (on workload mobility), we also describe capabilities that extend continuity to the
network supporting multiple data center sites and to certain considerations around host and application resiliency
interworking with the network.
46 Copyright © 2012, Juniper Networks, Inc.