Automation Anywhere HA and DR solution

In the context of Automation Anywhere, implementation of High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) reduces downtime and maintains continuity of business (CoB) for your bot activities.

• High Availability (HA)—refers to a system or component that is continuously operational for a desirably long period.
• Disaster Recovery (DR)—involves a set of policies and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster.

HA and DR are required for production deployments of Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere leverages your existing HA and DR infrastructure. We do not provide an internal HA or DR solution. Rather the Automation Anywhere components and configuration leverage your existing HA and DR infrastructure, load balancing, and failover systems to protect your bots and related data. See your data center administrator for your approved local HA and DR procedures.

Required HA and DR infrastructure elements

• Distributed Approach—in addition to clustering Automation Anywhere and related data center components, we also recommend that you deploy the Control Room and the Enterprise Clients on separate machines.

  Control Room is flexible enough to process a large number of requests. Deploy multiple instances of either Control Room or Enterprise Client on multiple physical or virtual servers, as needed.

• Load balancing—Performed by a load balancer, this is the process of distributing application or network traffic across multiple servers to protect service activities and allows workloads to be distributed among multiple servers. This ensures bot activity continues on clustered servers.

  For load balancer configuration details, see Enterprise 11: Load balancer requirements.

• Databases—Databases use their own built-in failover to protect the data. This ensures database data recovery.

  • Between the HA clusters, configure synchronous replication between the primary (active) and secondary (passive/standby) clustered MS SQL servers in the data center. This ensures consistency in the event of a database node failure.

    For the required HA synchronous replication, configure one of the following:

    • Backup replica to Synchronous-Commit mode of SQL Server Always On availability groups
    • SQL to Server Database Mirroring
  • Between the DR sites, configure your database to provide asynchronous replication from the primary (production) DR site to the secondary (recovery) DR site that is at a geographically separated location from the primary DR site.

Sample scenario

Point all Control Room instances within the same cluster to the same database and repository files. This is required to enable sharing data across multiple servers and ensuring data integrity is maintained across Enterprise Clients accessing Control Rooms within a cluster.

HA and DR deployment models

To ensure your Automation Anywhere is protected by HA or DR, configure your data centers according to the deployment models described in:

• High Availability deployment model
• High Availability Disaster Recovery deployment model