Preparing the Analytics subsystem for disaster recovery on VMware

Prepare the API Connect Analytics subsystem for disaster recovery in a VMware environment.

1. Perform a backup of the Analytics database.

   Scheduling automatic backups ensures that a recovery includes recent updates. For more information on configuring backups, see Configuring backup settings for Analytics.

2. Ensure that you have a backup of your project directory.
   The original project directory that was created with the apicup command during the initial product installation is required for disaster recovery, see: First steps for deploying in a VMware environment. The project directory contains the yaml files that describe your deployment, encryption keys, and deployment ISO files. It is not possible to restore the subsystem databases on a deployment that uses a new or different project directory.
3. Ensure that you have a backup of the analytics-extra-values.yaml file if you created one: Creating the analytics-extra-values file. This file might be included in the project directory backup if you kept it there.
4. Optional: Take a Virtual Machine (VM) snapshot of all your VMs; see Using VM snapshots for infrastructure backup and disaster recovery for details. This action does require a brief outage while all of the VMs in the subsystem cluster are shut down - do not take snapshots of running VMs, as they might not restore successfully. VM snapshots can offer a faster recovery when compared to redeploying OVAs and restoring from normal backups.
   Important: VM snapshots are not an alternative to the standard backups that are described in the previous steps, and which must be taken in order to use the API Connect restore feature.