High Availability Infoblox Grid

The Infoblox Grid provides a modular, layered architecture that enables a collection of Infoblox appliances to perform and be managed as a single, unified system.

The Grid establishes a distributed relationship between individual or paired appliances to remove single points of failure and other operational risks inherent in legacy DNS, DHCP and IP address management infrastructure, delivering the following benefits:

  • Improves network reliability through a high availability architecture
  • Consolidates and centralises management control across network subnets, zones and sites.
  • Improves scalability and IT staff efficiency through automation

Multiple features are available for eliminating points of failure and balancing service performance. Key reliability features include the following:

  • Hardened appliances with redundant, hot-swappable components such as power supplies and hard disks
  • Appliance unit failover and recovery via VRRP between redundant pairs
  • DNS Anycast and DHCP service load balancing
  • Automated system-wide backup
  • Automatic GRID member recovery—even across remote sites.
  • GRID Master failover and recovery between designated candidates

Grid Master

In an Infoblox Grid, the rough equivalent to the server that runs the central database in a conventional IPAM system is the Grid Master. Unlike most traditional IPAM systems, the Grid Master is just another Infoblox appliance, running the same software as all of the other appliances.

The Grid Master pushes global configuration data out to Grid Members, monitors member operations, synchronises member changes back into the central database, and distributes updates.

The Grid Master is in constant contact with other Grid Members and aggregates information from them in a global dashboard showing appliance diagnostics, current software version, service status, subnet capacity, troubleshooting information and other many management summaries. Through the Grid, maintenance and upgrades procedures can be performed with no downtime or interruption to network services.

Infoblox Grid members can be deployed as physical or virtual appliances, or deployed on Riverbed Steelhead hardware for example at a branch office where a customer does not wish to deploy additional hardware.