Disaster recovery deployment

A disaster is any event that interrupts the normal operations of an organization. A disaster could be power outages, failure or breakdown of systems, or natural calamities.   

Disaster recovery equips an organization to be prepared for a disaster by creating and maintaining a standby site. A standby site has an infrastructure that is identical to the primary site and ensures that an organization sustains a disaster and continues its operations with minimal or no impact.    

The process of disaster recovery involves backing up data on the primary site at regular intervals and restoring the backed-up data on the standby site. It is considered an active-passive replication.  

BMC Helix IT Operations Management components backed up 

Disaster recovery is accomplished by backing up the following components and restoring them on a standby cluster:  


    • Elasticsearch  
    • Victoria Metrics  
    • PostgreSQL  
    • Kafka   
    • Zookeeper  
    • Object Storage data
    • Knowledge Module (KM) repository  
    • AIOps
    • Kubernetes Config Maps and Secrets

Important

Disaster recovery is supported for all BMC Helix IT Operations Management applications including  BMC Discovery .

Related topics

System-requirements

Sizing-and-scalability-considerations

Disaster recovery overview 

DR_Architecture2.png

Component

Description

Primary site

The primary site is your data center, which hosts all your live systems. 

Standby site

The standby site is the disaster recovery system. You must create and maintain this site.
It must have an infrastructure identical to your primary site and must seamlessly take over the functionality if the primary site fails.

Failover

Failover is the process of switching to the standby site when a disaster occurs in the primary site.  

Failback

Failback is the process of transferring control back to the primary site to take over the functionality from the standby site.  


To configure disaster recovery, you need MinIO and the disaster recovery utility. MinIO is a part of the data lake services deployed (on both primary and secondary sites) by the BMC Helix ITOMdeployment manager. The installer provides the disaster recovery utility and is located at helix-on-prem-deployment-manager/utilities/disaster-recovery. 

You must run the disaster recovery utility with the backup option to back up data and with the restore option to restore data. You can configure the backup frequency and the data retention period.  

After configuring disaster recovery, data is backed up, saved in the MinIO on the primary site, and then replicated onto the MinIO on the standby site at scheduled intervals.
For more information about MinIO bucket replication, see Bucket Replication in the MinIO documentation.


Options to fail back to the primary site

Failback is transferring control back to the primary site to take over the functionality from the standby site. Here are a few options for failback:

  • Bring up the primary site and fail back to it
  • Make the standby site your new primary site 
  • Set up a new primary site and fail back to it


The following image depicts the options to fail back:

DR_Failback.png

To fail back to the primary site

Perform the following steps:

  1. Configure data backup on Site B.

    Important

    Site B becomes your active or new primary site at this stage.

    For more information about configuring data backup, see "To configure data backup on the primary site" in the Configuring-disaster-recovery topic.

  2. Perform either of the following actions:
    • If you chose option 1 or 2, bring up Site A.
    • If you chose option 3, create a new site (Site C). 

  3. Perform either of the following actions:
    • If you chose option 1 or 2, replicate data from Site B to Site A.
    • If you chose option 3, replicate data from Site B to Site C.
      For more information, see "To configure  MinIO data replication from the primary site to the standby site" in the  Configuring-disaster-recovery topic.

  4. Perform either of the following actions:

    • If you chose option 1, restore data on Site A.

      Important

      Skip this task if you chose option 2 to fail back (Make the standby site your new primary site). 

    • If you chose option 3, restore data on Site C.

      For more information, see Restoring-data-on-the-standby-site.


RPO and RTO measurements 

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the time-based measurement of tolerated data loss. Recovery Time Objecting (RTO) is the targeted duration between an event failure and the point where the operations resume.  
For more information, see Sizing-and-scalability-considerations.


Where to go from here

Configuring-disaster-recovery

 

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