Last updated: October 2025
Business Benefits
Q: How does Nasuni help ensure business continuity?
A: By combining high availability, automatic recovery, and non-disruptive upgrades, Nasuni ensures your data is always accessible, keeping your operations running smoothly.
Q: How does Nasuni reduce IT workload?
A: With automated recovery and upgrade processes, Nasuni minimizes manual intervention and off-hours IT work.
Q. What are the benefits of High Availability?
A: Some benefits of high availability include minimizing downtime, enhancing user productivity, regulatory compliance, and SLA adherence.
Minimizing downtime
HA Edges are designed to minimize downtime. If a component fails, such as an appliance node, internal service, network connection, or a VM host, the system automatically switches to a redundant component, allowing clients to resume the same session. This is critical for:
Business continuity.
Resilient real-time collaboration.
24/7 operations.
Enhancing user productivity
Reduced downtime means employees maintain productivity without waiting for IT to restore services. This is particularly important in environments with:
Global teams across time zones.
Large-scale file operations (such as design, video editing, and analytics).
Cloud-integrated workflows.
Regulatory compliance and SLAs
Many industries require guaranteed uptime and data accessibility for compliance reasons. High availability supports adherence to:
Legal and regulatory mandates (such as HIPAA and GDPR).
Internal service level agreements (SLAs).
External contractual obligations.
High Availability
Q: What level of availability does Nasuni provide?
A: Nasuni HA Edge Appliances are designed to deliver “Four Nines” availability (99.99 percent availability), ensuring continuous access to your critical data.
Q: What are Nasuni’s recovery time and data loss objectives?
A: Nasuni HA Edge offers an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of ≤ 60 seconds and an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of 0 seconds, ensuring rapid recovery and zero data loss.
Q: How does Nasuni handle hardware or service failures?
A: Nasuni HA Edge Appliances automatically recover from service or hardware failures, minimizing downtime and maintaining workload continuity.
Q: Do I need to adjust client options to realize the benefits of an HA Edge Appliance?
A: Yes. HA Edge clients should configure their NFS mount options to support the ≤ 60-second SLO. Specifically, they must set the timeo value (expressed in tenths of a second) below 600 and ensure that the product of timeo and retransmission exceeds 60 seconds. For example, timeo=100 (10 seconds) and retransmission=7 results in a nominal total retry window of 70 seconds. Retry timing might vary due to exponential backoff behavior in some NFS clients. The default to mount for NFS in Rocky Linux 9 is timeo=600, retransmission=2, which might cause a client to experience more than 60 seconds of service disruption even if service is restored in under 60 seconds.
Non-Disruptive Upgrades
Q: Do software upgrades disrupt my business operations?
A: No. Nasuni supports non-disruptive upgrades, allowing you to schedule updates during business hours without impacting workloads.
Q: Can I automate appliance updates?
A: Yes. Updates can be automated and scheduled to reduce IT work outside business hours and improve operational efficiency.
Architecture
Q: What kind of high-availability architecture does Nasuni use?
A: Nasuni HA Edge uses an active-passive architecture with a shared cache disk to ensure seamless failover and data consistency.
Q: What is a non-HA-ready state?
A: A non-HA-ready state means the appliance has n nodes instead of n+1. Further system service failures, power state changes, or network outages for the remaining n nodes result in an outage for clients instead of an HA Edge Appliance failover.
Deployment
Q: What platforms does Nasuni HA Edge currently support?
A: Nasuni HA Edge currently supports NFS v3 and is compatible with VMware 7 and 8 ESXi plus vCenter environments.
Q: Can I DR between HA Edge and standard Edge appliances?
A: Yes. We support DR between appliance types. Depending on the direction, some restrictions apply.
DR from HA Edge to Standard Edge Appliances
No restrictions apply.
DR from Standard Edge to HA Edge Appliances
The source Edge Appliance must comply with the compatibility constraints for the HA Edge. This means it cannot own or connect to a non-NFS volume. During the DR process, we inspect the NOC to determine if the source Edge Appliance is compatible. If not, we display an error to the user and block further progress through the DR workflow.
After DR from a standard NEA to an HA Edge, in some cases, users can add CIFS to an NFS volume remotely connected to the new HA Edge, creating an unsupported state. Users should be careful not to add CIFS to NFS volumes connected to HA Edge appliances.
Q: When is HA established after a successful DR?
A: The HA cluster is formed immediately, but we turn off service-failure-based failover triggers for 2 minutes immediately after a successful DR. This gives the services a chance to stabilize, and avoids unnecessary failover as services start.
Q: Can I use an outbound HTTP proxy to enable the HA Edge to connect to services hosted in the Nasuni Operation Center?
A: No. The HA Edge does not currently support connecting to NOC services through an outbound HTTP proxy.
Q: Can I limit the scope of the fencing agent account in my VMware vCenter?
A: Yes, you can. Nasuni recommends deploying HA Edge VMs to a dedicated HA Edge VM folder in vCenter and creating a fencing agent account that:
Is scoped to that dedicated HA Edge VM folder and its children.
Has a unique role with only the following permissions:
Virtual machine > Interaction > Power off.
Virtual machine > Interaction > Power on.
Virtual machine > Interaction > Reset.
Virtual machine > Interaction > Suspend.
Operations
Q: Can I power off HA Edge Appliance member nodes via vCenter?
A: Yes, but there is some disruption risk depending on the member node’s active or standby role.
NOTE: Nasuni does not provide a user interface for powering off a single HA Edge Appliance member node. This must be done via the vCenter UI.
Q: What is the impact of powering off the active node?
A: Powering off the active member results in an unplanned and unprepared failover and a non-HA-ready state. Client traffic briefly pauses and resumes its session after the failover. The HA Edge Appliance remains non-HA-ready until the node reboots, is powered up, or is replaced. At this point, it attempts to join or rejoin the cluster as the standby node.
Q: Can I “hard stop” HA Edge Appliance member nodes via vCenter?
A: Yes, but there is some HA risk involved, and you should always reboot the standby node. If you need to reboot the active node, we suggest performing a failover from the NMC UI before using the vCenter UI to reboot the node, which is then on standby.
NOTE: Nasuni does not provide a user interface for rebooting a single HA Edge Appliance member node. This must be done via the vCenter UI.
Q: What guest power management options in vCenter are not supported?
A: The Suspend, Reset, Shut Down Guest OS, and Reset Guest OS options are not currently supported.
Q: What is the impact of rebooting the standby node?
A: Rebooting the standby results in a non-HA-ready state until the reboot completes, at which point the standby successfully rejoins the HA Edge Appliance cluster as the standby node.
Q: What is the impact of rebooting the active node?
A: Rebooting the active node results in an unplanned and unprepared failover and a non-HA-ready state until the reboot completes and the descended primary rejoins the HA Edge Appliance cluster as the standby node.
Q: Can I shut down my HA Edge Appliance?
A: You can shut down your HA Edge Appliance via the NMC UI State Management page. This shuts down the whole HA Edge Appliance, resulting in a service outage.
Q: Can I reboot my HA Edge Appliance?
A: You can reboot your HA Edge Appliance via the NMC UI State Management page. This reboots the standby node, waits for it to rejoin and restore HA, then failover the active and standby roles, rebooting the new standby in the process.
Q: Can I change the Service Console’s service user password on an HA Edge Appliance?
A: You can change the service user password on an HA Edge Appliance. When you change the service user password, you should apply the change to both nodes using the following process outline:
On the current active node:
Access the Service Console using the old password.
Change the service user password.
Confirm you can access the service console using the new password.
Perform a failover via the NMC.
Repeat all of step 1 above on the current active node, which was the standby before the failover performed in step 2.
Q: What if I forget to change the service user password on the standby node and they get out of sync?
A: If you forget to change the service user password on the standby node when you change it on the primary node, you might not be able to access the Service Console after a failover. In that case, contact Nasuni Support; they can connect to the Support Bridge and assist you in resetting the password on both HA Edge Appliance member nodes.
Q: Are all Service Menu commands supported on an HA Edge?
A: No, the following Service Menu commands should not be run on an HA Edge.
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Troubleshooting
Q: How does a high load on the vCenter API server affect the Nasuni HA Edge Appliance?
A: If the vCenter cluster, especially the vCenter API server, is under heavy load, fencing operations can fail during specific quorum events, including node loss and failover events. Those events employ vCenter API calls to perform fencing operations, specifically node reboot. If that call fails, the fencing agent returns an error, and the cluster does not bring resources online because we cannot ensure that the descending active node does not interfere with shared resources. In this scenario, contact Nasuni Support.
Q: Why can’t I create volumes with new escrow keys immediately after failover?
A: Post failover, escrow keys cannot be created until the licenses refresh automatically, every hour, or manually via the License Refresh. Existing escrow keys can be used to create volumes.
Q: Why is the HA NEA Uptime occasionally inaccurate?
A: The NMC Filer Status Page incorrectly reports the HA NEA Uptime after completely shutting down an HA Edge appliance and bringing it back online due to a minor bug in calculating the HA NEA uptime.