Enterprise 11: Re-establish a duplicate DR site

After a secondary (backup) site is recovered as the primary (production) site, establish a new secondary DR site.

Prerequisites

The recovery site is up and running as the new production site.

The process of returning activity to a primary (active) production site, plus secondary (backup) site depends on the state of the original primary site.

Procedure

  • If the old production environment becomes available again, complete the following to switch back to the original DR primary site.
    1. Restore/replicate the DR database and file system to the original production database and file system respectively.
      If the data added in DR environment is not needed in production environment, skip to Step 3.
    2. If any new users were added to DR recovery site environment and they logged into Control Room and Bot Runners, reverse COB procedures need to be followed for those users. For example:
      Note: This step is only applicable for new users that were added in during the disaster. If no new users were added in DR environment, skip this step.
      • Prepare mapping of corresponding DR Bot Runners with production Bot Runners.
      • Run the database query in the recovery production environment database for those Bot Runners.
      • Run the Activation utility on new Bot Runners in recovery production environment.
      • Login to recovery production Control Room with new added production Bot Runners, from the Enterprise Client.
    3. Bring up the new DR primary (production) Control Room.
    4. Verify new DR primary (production) environment is working, as expected.
    5. Stop the DR Control Room services on the DR recovery site.
    6. Establish the replication between the new DR primary (production) and DR secondary (standby) Control Room (DB and NAS).
  • If the old DR primary production environment is rendered completely unusable due to the disaster, re-establish a new secondary (standby) DR site. Complete the recovery DR steps to re-establish primary and secondary DR sites.
    1. Restore/replicate the database and file system data from DR environment to the new production environment.
    2. Generate the mapping files containing host related information of DR Bot Runners and new production Bot Runners.
    3. Run the Activation utility on each of the new production Bot Runners.
    4. Execute the database script on new production Control Room database.
      Note: The web.config configuration flag is strictly enforced.

Next steps

No additional steps are required. The DR primary and secondary sites are restored.

  • The bot Activation utility does not need to be run again. Activation occurs when Automation Anywhere is first deployed to the DR cluster sites only.
  • For any subsequent disasters, only the database query needs to be run on DR secondary (standby) Control Room database. This is required because the replication between DR primary (production) and DR secondary (standby) overwrites DR secondary site Bot Runner data in DR secondary site database with DR primary (production) Bot Runner data.
  • Similarly, the mapping between DR primary and DR secondary Bot Runner is established. Use the same mapping for all subsequent disasters or mock drills.