Warm stand-by

Host two setups or sites - primary and backup for the warm stand-by DR procedure.

Prerequisites

Each setup would have following recommended configurations:

  1. Automation 360 hosted in clustered mode (three nodes)
  2. SQL instance
  3. Repository storage (shared network drive)
  4. Git repository

Synchronous replication of the data onto the backup node should be configured. The backup node should have the exact same configuration as Primary node; except for Control Room.

Once configured the setup scheme would look like this:

HA for disaster recovery
Complete the disaster recovery deployment on the two geographically separated sites, where one site is the primary (active) site and the other is the secondary (passive) site used for backup. If the primary site cluster fails, perform recovery on the secondary site.
Note: The secondary site should be set up as a passive configuration so that the failover procedure can be performed without delay.
The procedure is identical regardless of whether you are switching over from primary to secondary, or from the secondary to primary sites. Connect the Control Room to the replicated database and shared the repository on the secondary site.

These steps apply to all the servers in the Automation 360 cluster, including the Control Room servers, SQL server, and Elasticsearch server.

Procedure

  1. Install Automation 360 on the secondary site.
    Follow the steps for installation up to the database configuration.
    Installing Control Room using Custom mode
  2. In the Database Configuration window, add database details for the secondary site such as the database server IP address and default port number.
    Configure Microsoft database type and server
  3. Verify the Elasticsearch details in the Provide Elasticsearch Credentials window.
    Because the Elasticsearch data is already replicated from the primary database, you do not have to provide the Elasticsearch password.
  4. After the installation is complete, verify that the Control Room URL and repository path is available in the Control Room Welcome page.
    You can change the Control Room URL and repository path after you log in to the Control Room as the next step.
  5. Log in to the Control Room using your administrator credentials to change the Configuration Settings in Administration > Settings:
    1. To allow users to access the Control Room using a public IP address, change the Control Room Access URL settings to point to the secondary site access URL in General Settings > General.
    2. Change the Repository path to the secondary site repository path in Control Room database and software > Control Room repository.
  6. Verify the data for the following:
    • Users, roles, schedule, triggers, credential information, and workload settings
    • Elasticsearch certificate and connectivity
    • Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users, Bot Insight, Discovery Bot, and IQ Bot
    Note: Perform a byte-by-byte measurement of the recovered data and compare the primary and secondary site data. If you see any difference, verify the subscriber logs for any intermittent failure due to any network issue.

Next steps

After the recovery site is operating as the primary site, configure a replacement secondary site. Using the database tools, set up replication from the recovery primary site to the replacement secondary site.