Access AEM Cold Standby Instance

[wkong14]

Hi,

I was wondering if it's normal for us to be unable to access the standby instance for AEM. My team followed the documentation provided by: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-64/deploying/deploying/tarmk-cold-standby... and was able to set up both the primary and standby instance. However, whenever we tried to access the standby instance, we were met with HTTP ERROR 503 AuthenticationSupport service missing. Cannot authenticate request.

We dug around for quite a while until we came across this tumblr post: https://www.tumblr.com/cq-ops/102621710969/how-to-configure-an-aem-6-cold-standby-failover which mentioned that "You won't be able to login to AEM on the STANDBY instance (that's why it's "Cold"). However, you should be able to login to the Apache Felix console at http://server:4502/system/console."

However, in this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr0n-P5PnhA, the creator was able to login to his standby instance just fine even though the steps that he followed were exactly the same as ours. How come there is such a discrepancy?

Besides this access issue, the standby instance performs exactly as it should. If I were to create a template in the primary instance, shut it down, bring up the standby as the primary instance, the template is available on the standby (now primary) instance. We can access the instance fine once it is the primary instance.

We are on AEM 6.5.14. All bundles have been started, none are missing. The error logs does not mention any errors. I have tried deleting the repoinit folder, index folder, and used oak-run for offline compaction and checkpoints. All of which have been found browsing this forum, but none have been able to solve the 503 issue. Any help is appreciated, thanks!

[lukasz-m · Accepted solution]

Hi @wkong14,

I think everything is correct. If you will look into official documentation, it clearly says that it is expected that nothing except OSGI Web Console is accessible.

• https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-65/deploying/deploying/tarmk-cold-standby...
  

You are right, that YouTube video is showing that somehow AEM Cold Standby is accessible, but keeping in mind how it was original designed by Adobe and what you can find in official materials from Adobe, I do not think this should be considered as a proper reference.

The purpose of the standby instances is to guarantee a live data copy of the master repository and ensure a quick switch without data loss in case the master is unavailable for any reason.

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So this should not be the case to have full or even wide access to AEM Cold Standby instance.

Summarizing, I think you do not need to worried, and it seems you have correct setup.