Ping Federate Clustering HA for Admin Console

Question

I was working on a PoC where Ping Federate needs to be in High Availability mode. The clustering documentation provided by ping [link] specifies how to cluster runtime servers and mentions that only one Admin Console should be present. How to achieve HA if Admin Console goes down due to some issue?

Edit: Using PingFederate 8.4.0.

Answer 1

Multiple console instances are not supported within PingFederate clusters.

If one has a "mandate" from the business to have two consoles, then I would use an external directory synchronization tool to synchronize the /pingfederate directory on a regular basis (on the half hour, maybe). There's no need to synch the /pingfederate/log and /pingfederate/work directories. I would also exclude the pingfederate/bin/run.properties file (so that the proper IP addresses can be set in it). Include the "spare" console's IP address in the Discovery line in the run.properties. Only one of the consoles can be live at any given time - if a second one starts while the other is running, the second one will see the other, and shut down.

Answer 2

While PingAccess does have clustered console, PingFederate currently does not.

Recommendation: Stop the PingFederate console service, backup the entire directory, and restart (or leave off unless configuration changes are needed).