Preparing the management subsystem for disaster recovery on VMware

Prepare a Management subsystem for disaster recovery by taking specific steps before and after the installation of the subsystem.

About this task

  • This task must be performed before any disaster event occurs, and also prior to the installation of a replacement Management subsystem during the recovery process. Best practice is to complete these steps immediately after initial configuration of a management subsystem during your original v10 deployment.
  • Any local backups are presumed to have been lost in the disaster scenario and are non-recoverable in this procedure.
Important: Successful disaster recovery depends on recovery of both the Management subsystem and the Developer Portal subsystem. You must complete preparation steps for both subsystems in order to achieve disaster recovery. If you have to perform a restore, you must complete the restoration of the Management Service first, and then immediately restore the Developer Portal. Therefore, the backups of the Management and Portal must be taken at the same time, to ensure that the Portal sites are consistent with Management database.

Procedure

  1. Make sure that you have a backup that can be used in case of a disaster event:
  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. 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 API Connect backups that are described in the previous step. Do not rely solely on VM snapshots for your backups.

What to do next

You should now complete the preparation steps for the Developer Portal subsystem; see Preparing the Developer Portal subsystem for disaster recovery on VMware.