After preparing your VoIP Availability Manager deployment for discovery, you initiate an IP Availability Manager discovery for each IP Availability Manager application in the deployment. Then, you initiate a VoIP Availability Manager discovery by adding each IP Availability Manager as a topology source to VoIP Availability Manager.

VoIP Availability Manager provides two options for adding an IP Availability Manager as a topology source.

  • Option 1 (Recommended): Specify the name of the IP Availability Manager in the domain.conf file.

    Each IP Availability Manager specified in the domain.conf file is automatically added as a topology source when VoIP Availability Manager starts up.

  • Option 2: Manually add the IP Availability Manager as a topology source using the Add Source command.

    A user attaches the Global Console to VoIP Availability Manager and issues an Add Source command for each IP Availability Manager that is to be added as a topology source.

    Using either option will cause VoIP Availability Manager to import device topology from the IP Availability Manager sources and to initiate its own discovery. Option 2 can be used at any time to add an additional IP Availability Manager as a topology source.

    You can combine Option 1 with Option 2 or use just one of the options to add IP Availability Manager sources to VoIP Availability Manager. Comparison of discovery initialization Options 1 and 2 compares the two options.

Table 1. Comparison of discovery initialization Options 1 and 2

Option 1: Automatically added sources (Recommended)

Option 2: Manually added sources

A user needs to specify the IP Availability Manager sources in the domain.conf file before starting VoIP Availability Manager.

A user can add an IP Availability Manager source at any time without restarting VoIP Availability Manager.

Whenever VoIP Availability Manager is restarted, it adds as topology sources only the IP Availability Managers specified in the domain.conf file.

Whenever VoIP Availability Manager is restarted, it does not add as topology sources the IP Availability Manager sources previously added using the Add Source command.

When an IP Availability Manager is not running, VoIP Availability Manager proceeds as follows:

  1. Adds the IP Availability Manager as a topology source.

  2. Periodically attempts to connect to the IP Availability Manager.

  3. Imports topology from the IP Availability Manager when it becomes available—is running.

When an IP Availability Manager is not running, invoking the Add Source command to add the IP Availability Manager as a topology source will fail.

Adding an IP Availability Manager as a topology source causes VoIP Availability Manager to start a probe that:

  1. Creates an InChargeDomain object having the instance name of the IP Availability Manager application.

  2. Starts a synchronization program that probes the IP Availability Manager repository for device topology.

    Thereafter, at startup or whenever the connection to the IP Availability Manager is lost and then re-established, VoIP Availability Manager automatically runs this probe.