Hi,

I am trying to come up with a solution to add redundancy to our SSM deployments. We currently have an SSM solution in place that uses a single streaming server (RHEL 6.x) but I need to add a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) server to the mix while maintaining the single source IP address for clients downstream. In my case, both (or all) streaming servers will produce the same, redundant content. All servers are Active, i.e. we run Active/Active not Active/Standby.

I am wondering how others have solved this issue? I'm curious if anyone has solved this at the network layer without touching/modifying the streaming servers themselves?

How is something like this handled typically? Would clustering the servers together solve this?

If I could get the two servers to produce the same identical traffic, including source address, I should be able to use PIM on a router to prune the extra traffic thereby only producing one Active stream. At least that's one method I think would work but it might not be the best or it may not work at all.

Another idea I am considering would be to NAT/PAT the real server addresses so that they all appear as 1 single address, then let PIM auto-prune. I've tried this in a lab and while the NAT worked (it's really PAT by Cisco terms), I could not get SSM to work at the same time.

Has anyone else solved something like this before?

Any ideas would be most appreciated.

Thank you
-SR