Setting up high availability

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High availability for the HSM Signer is achieved by running multiple redundant instances that balance the load and automatically take over if one fails. The primary LPAR generates the keys, and its data volume is backed up and shared with secondary LPARs so that each wallet uses the same public and private key pair across all systems. This setup ensures that even if one LPAR goes down, another can continue processing transactions without interruption.

Before you begin

Before you configure High Availability (HA), ensure the following requirements are met:
  • The LPARs must use different crypto adapters initialized with the same master key.
  • The following Terraform variables must have the same values on the target LPAR and the primary LPAR: 
    SECRET 
MKVP 
USER_PIN 
TOKEN_LABEL 
TOKEN_ID
  • The signed client certificate and private key must be different for each LPAR. For more information see, Generating client CSR
  • The IP addresses of all LPARs must be whitelisted. For more information see, Whitelisting IP.

About this task

When HA is configured, the HSM signers work as a load balancer. If one fails, other HSM signer takes over.

After the primary LPAR is fully operational, complete the following steps to bring additional LPARs online for high availability.

Note: By default, the PREGEN_KEYS is 1000. You can configure it by modifying the PREGEN_KEYS value in ./contracts/terraform.tfvars

Procedure

  1. Create a backup of the data volume on the primary LPAR, as described in Backup of Data Volume, and transfer it to the LPAR designated for HA.
  2. Start the HA LPAR by following the instructions in Recovery of Data Volume.
  3. Verify that the HSM‑Signer health check completes successfully. For details, see Logs Validation.