An N+1 Load Sharing cluster is a collection of Avaya Aura® Media Servers that work closely together. The cluster can be viewed as one system that is capable of providing service at an increased capacity and with redundancy. All the nodes in a cluster must be running the same application set.

An Avaya Aura® MS N+1 Load Sharing cluster must consist of a Primary and Secondary server. You can add additional servers, known as Standard servers.

Perform the following procedures to first configure the Primary, Secondary, and optional Standard servers and then connect the servers as an N+1 Load Sharing cluster.

In the following procedures, you can enable and configure a Replication Account. You must configure and enable the Replication Account by using the same user name and password on each server in the cluster. Replication is used for communication between the servers and enables configuration changes to be automatically replicated throughout the cluster when changes are made on the Primary server.

An Avaya Aura® MS cluster must use a centralized time source for clock synchronization. For more information, see Setting the network time source server.

Limitations:

• The maximum number of servers in a cluster is eight.

• N+1 Load Sharing clusters are engineered to provide the processing capacity of N servers. During normal operations, all N+1 servers are processing sessions. When one server is out of service, the cluster still provides the engineered capacity provided by N servers.

• Either the Primary or Secondary server must remain in service for the cluster to remain operational. Cluster service is lost if the Primary and Secondary servers are out of service at the same time.

• N+1 Load Sharing Clusters, and 1+1 High Availability clusters are two different configuration options that cannot be combined.

• A cluster must not span geographical locations. Cluster members must be on the same local network.