How vis|ability provides High Availability

In mission critical environments —like emergency dispatch, grid control, or military command—vis|ability can’t simply “go dark” if a server fails. High Availability ensures the platform stays online so video walls, operator workstations, and critical information remain visible and actionable, even when hardware or infrastructure issues occur.

Because it runs on the network, the visability platform has many levels of redundacy inherent in this infrastructure. 

The two components that prompt the most questions of high availability are the System Manager and the Display Node.

The System Manager operates as the control layer of the platform.  It is not latency critical, unlike the Display Node, so brief interruptions can go unnoticed. 

But to design the system with High Availability (HA), it is best deployed on a resilient virtual machine where modern hypervisotrs (VMware, Hyper-V, tec) provide host-level failover, backup and resstore functions, and hardware abstraction (no dependency on a specific machine).  In the event of a failure, the VM can be automatically restarted or restored with minimal interruption, while the visualization environment continues operating.  The benefit of this approach is it provides infrastructure-managed HA instaed of application-managed HA as is preferred by IT teams.

Display Node High Availability is achieved through mirroring—running two synchronized nodes in parallel—so that if one fails, the other continues driving the display with no interruption.  Both Display Nodes receive the same inputs, render the same content, and stay frame-aligned.  Only one is actively driving the display at a time, or both are available via a switching mechanism.

Normal operation

Here is what the mirrored Display Nodes operate normally:

• Primary Display Node renders and outputs to the wall

• Secondary Display Node runs in lockstep (hot standby)

• Both are continuously communicating to the System Manager

Failure event

And if there is ever a failure of the primary Display Node (hardware, GPU, OS, etc.)

• The system switches output to the secondary node

• The wall continues with:

  • same layout

  • same sources

  • minimal or no visible disruption

No reboot. No restart. No reallocation.

If you need further assistance - to understand how High Availability is acheived in your vis|ability system, to validate a design, or to install the software - please feel free to contact your Activu vis|ability system integrator, or contact us directly here.