Solutions Pre-requisite

Hardware Sizing

For a simplex (single server) deployment, minimum and recommended hardware requirements are as follows:

For a redundant deployment, two servers of the same specifications (as mentioned above) are needed.

Software Requirement

Following are the prerequisites for setting up a Generic Connector under different deployment profiles. 

System Access Requirements

Following ports should remain open on the Firewall. The local security policy and any antivirus should also allow open communication on the following ports:

• <Client Application> is a machine running client application of EF Connector. For server-based applications like Siebel, it’s Siebel Communication Server. For desktop-based applications, it’s the machine address of the agent desktop running the desktop application.
• In a redundant deployment, both EF Connector instances communicate with each other on the same TCP OpenWire port 61616. In the table above, it’s mentioned as EF Connector (B) ⇒ EF Connector. 
• These are defaults set in EF Connector, but you can always change the default configuration.

Time Synchronization Requirements

An important consideration is time synchronization between related components. Communication between EF Connector, client applications, and Cisco Finesse carry timestamps. If the system dates and times are not synchronized the system can produce unpredictable results. Therefore, please make every effort to adhere to the following time synchronization guidelines:

EF Connector, client applications, and Cisco Finesse should have their Time Zone and time configured properly according to the geographic region and synchronized. To configure the time zone, please see the instructions from the hardware or software manufacturer of NTP server. Client applications and EF Connector should be synchronized to the second. This synchronization should be maintained continuously and validated on a regular basis. For security reasons, Network Time Protocol (NTP) V 4.1+ is recommended.

Deployment Modes

Non-Redundant / Simplex Mode Deployment

In simplex deployment, the application is installed on a single server with no failover support of EF Connector. However, the same EF Connector can still communicate with primary and secondary Finesse servers.

Simplex mode is useful for lab tests and commercial deployments at a smaller scale. Figure below explains the simplex mode of Generic Connector.

High Availability (HA) / Duplex Deployment

Active-Passive (Primary / Secondary) Setup

To configure the Connector in Active-Passive mode, set the value of attribute “GRC_CONSUMER_PRIORITY” in Connector configuration. For the Primary Connector, set the value of this attribute to “127” (without quotes). For the Secondary Connector, set the value of this attribute to “100” (without quotes).

The active-Passive mode has the following configurations.

Configurations for Site-1

Primary-AMQ: broker-1, Secondary-AMQ: broker-2

Generic Connector Configuration should look like this, For a detailed description of the GC please consult properties

Configurations for Site-2

Primary-AMQ: broker-1, Secondary-AMQ: broker-2, For a detailed description of the GC please consult Connector Configuration Parameters (Environment Variables)

Failover Scenarios

The following table shows different failover scenarios and their impact on the Connector Clients.

Failover is handled in a way if any component goes down, passive components take over in a seamless way.

Active-Active Setup

For an Active-Active deployment, the Failover URL is set to use the local AMQ as primary and remote AMQ as secondary.

For GC-1, the configuration would look like this, For a detailed description of the GC please consult Connector Configuration Parameters (Environment Variables)

For GC-2, the configuration would look like this, For a detailed description of the GC please consult Connector Configuration Parameters (Environment Variables)

Where [AMQ-1] should be replaced with the IP / machine-name of ActiveMQ-1 and [AMQ-2] should be replaced with the IP / machine-name of ActiveMQ-2. Finesse-1 is the IP/name of the Finesse-1 server and Finesse-2 is the IP/name of the Finesse-2 server.

Both Connectors will have its local AMQ as primary brokers and both Connector instances will be serving agents' requests in parallel. All client requests received by Connector-1 are handled by Connector-1 and all requests received by Connector-2 will be handled by Connector-2. In case of failure of any component at any Connector instance, the other Connector instance will take over and handle the request. 

We have achieved it using ActiveMQ configurable properties specifically Consumer priority, Priority Backup, and building a Connector Sync mechanism in Generic Connector.

Failover Scenarios

Deployment Steps

1. Download the docker-compose an env file from Google-Drive
2. Download the required deployment folder

1. Create a folder on a Linux machine in any path of your inside root.
2. Place the files inside the created folder as follows:
   
3. Open env.txt file with text editor
4. 
5. Make the desired changes and update the file
6. run the command chmod 755 ./deploy.sh

7. now run the ./deploy.sh file and you can see after completion your docker image is running

8. For Active MQ deployment
9. 
10. For Rest deployment
11. 
12. After that run the following commands to edit the ActiveMQ configuration

• • a. Go into the folder where the docker-compose file is placed

    Command

    cd /root/gc-docker-compose

  • b. Get the ActiveMQ image id by following command

    Command

    docker container ps -a

    

  • c. Enter the following set of commands to reach to the ActiveMQ configuration file (activemq.xml), and set the urls as in the following image

  • Command

    docker exec -it fd5346f6ab11 bash
    cd conf
    vim activemq.xml

  • Add the server IP where the GC and ActiveMQ are running
  • eg. server IP 192.168.2.162

  • 

    Note

    Note: If you wanted to know about vim command, Here is the detail.

Connector Configuration Parameters (Environment Variables)

MX Monitoring

GC now supports JMX monitoring. You can monitor the performance of GC via any of the monitoring tools such as JConsole and VisualVM. GC supports JMX Monitoring on port 9090.