Maintenance
- Shirly Tsang
Analytics
NIOS Software Patches and Upgrades
All software patches and updates are controlled and distributed by the Grid Master for members in a Grid. Software updates can be downloaded from https://support.infoblox.com. For detailed information on uploading, distributing, and scheduling/performing software upgrades, refer to NIOS documentation https://docs.infoblox.com. Use the following process to update a standalone appliance or Grid immediately:
Download the appropriate upgrade file from the Infoblox support site.
Login to your Grid Manager. Navigate to the Grid → Upgrade tab.
Click on Upload.
The appliance uploads the file and displays the status of the upload in the status bar. You can click the Stop icon in the status bar to stop the upload. Ensure that you do not navigate away from the Upgrade tab until after the upload is complete. Otherwise, the upload process stops.
To distribute the software upgrade to each member immediately, including the Grid Master itself, open the dropdown for Distribute in the Toolbar. Select Distribute Now. Click Yes in the Confirm Start Distribution dialog.
After distribution is complete, you can optionally test the upgrade on your Grid Master without implementing it. Click on Test Upgrade in the Toolbar to run this test.
To perform the actual software upgrade, open the Upgrade dropdown in the Toolbar and select Upgrade Now.
Click Yes in the Confirm Start Upgrade dialog box.
Managing Licenses
For full details on managing licenses for Infoblox vNIOS and other services, refer to Infoblox documentation https://docs.infoblox.com/display/nios85/Managing+Licenses. The following important information should be noted regarding subscription licenses.
When a subscription license expires, all features continue to work as is with the following exceptions:
If the DNS or DHCP license expires, if you add a new authoritative zone or a network, they do not appear in Grid Manager.
If the Threat Protection or Threat Protection Update license expires, you may experience problems when creating custom rules or publishing data.
Although NIOS continues to collect data, you will not be able run reports on the data collected during the expired period. After you renew the subscription license, you can run reports on this data.
Data feeds for features such as RPZ, Threat Analytics, and ADP stop. The services keep running with existing data.
Managing AWS Service Quotas
It is important to be aware that each AWS account has default quotas/limits, setting a maximum number of each resource type you can deploy. For example, there is a limit on how many EC2 instances you can deploy in each region. It is especially important to consider these quotas when planning for high availability and disaster recovery. For additional information on Service Quotas, including how to request increases, refer to AWS documentation: AWS service quotas - AWS General Reference .
The following is one method available to check your limits and usage:
In the AWS Management Console, Use the Services menu to navigate to Trusted Advisor under Management & Guidance.
Select Service Limits from the Trusted Advisor menu.
Expand any of the categories to view details on the service limit and your usage.
In the above screenshot, you can see this account has reached the limit for Elastic IP Addresses in the US West 2 region.
Emergency Maintenance
Infoblox recommends that you deploy a full Grid with availability and fault tolerance in mind to avoid outages. The most common issue that can affect performance of an Infoblox vNIOS for AWS instance serving as a Grid member, caused by transient failure of services, is loss of network connectivity with the Grid Master. In many cases, no action is necessary; the member will continue to provide services such as DNS. When connectivity with the Grid Master is restored, the member will resynchronize with the Grid. For a more permanent failure, actions depend on the role of your vNIOS for AWS instance in the Grid. For failure of a Grid Master, you should promote a Grid Master Candidate as described in the Backup and Recovery section of this guide. For a Grid member, a new instance should be deployed and added to the Grid, also described in the Backup and Recovery section of this guide.