Disaster Recovery Plan: Self-Hosted Server
Objective
A robust Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is crucial for a smooth and streamlined functioning of an organization. DR workflows must be established for essential software tools that your organization uses and relies on for basic operations such as data access and uptime on a whole.
Zmanda Pro provides a DRP for the Self-hosted Zmanda Pro Server following which, you will be prepared to administer your devices and their backups for recovery in the case of a disaster.
NOTE: This DRP is scoped to just the server configurations and not the backup data itself. To secure your backup data, it is recommended that you have redundant copies of the data in different geographic locations. It is also a good practice to have periodic Disk Image Backups which enables you to perform recovery of your client devices as well, in one go.
Environment Configuration
Pre-requisites
Configuring a DRP for the Zmanda Pro Server expects you to have the following requirements met
Primary Server Setup
A Primary Server Setup: This will be your main, active server. All your schedules and operations will be through this, and all your devices will share a live connection to this server. The Primary Server must be activated.
The Primary Server will have self-backup configurations in the server.cfg file which is available in your Zmanda Pro Setup Package.
Server Self-backup Configuration
An offsite storage location on the same network, to which the Primary Zmanda Pro server triggers self-backups. This storage is usually on a different datacenter.
You may also configure multiple locations to backup your Zmanda Pro Server configurations.
In a recovery scenario you will use these configurations to start your Zmanda Pro Server.
You may also configure schedules for the server self-backup
Standby Server Setup
[Optional] A Standby Server Setup: It is best practice to pre-configure a standby server which you can invoke for an immediate failover in the case of a disaster.
You may choose to either pre-activate your standby server [or] activate it on-demand.
The standby server is ideally hosted in a datacenter on a different geographic location, and it will have identical configurations to that of the Primary server. However, you will not be able to use this server for any operations. You may only use this as a recovery server in the event of a disaster on your Primary datacenter.
Post recovery, you will be able to use your standby instance of the Zmanda Pro server as you would use your Primary.
In the case you choose to not configure your standby Zmanda Pro server, you will require a fresh setup configured to trigger self-backup recovery
NOTE: Only an activated server can trigger recovery. Hence, it is important to have your standby server or your secondary server to be activated first, which involves procuring a License_Activator for that instance.
In a pre-activated plan, you will be able to configure your standby server and activate it at the time of deployment of your Primary server.
In an on-demand activation, you will configure your standby server but not activate it. In this state you cannot run recovery on the standby server. You will first need to procure a License_Activator.
Recovery in case of disaster
On your activated standby [or] secondary Zmanda Pro server instance you may run the recover command from your activator to select a point in time to your primary Zmanda Pro server that you want to go back to. The standby server must be able to reach out to the offsite storage where the self-backups are stored
You have to update your organization's DNS records to match the standby server's IP address. This will allow all your client devices to now connect to your standby server. If you're not running a DNS server, you will have to make changes to the hosts file in all your client devices to point to the standby server.
With the above change your client devices will automatically establish a connection with your standby server. You should see all your devices in the Online state after making the DNS changes.
You will be able to run restores on your client devices provided the storage you used earlier is available and reachable from the standby server.
Licensing Information
Pre-activation
Workflow for pre-activation
Deploy & Activate Primary Server
configure self-backup location and protocol
Deploy & Activate Standby Server
configure self-backup location and protocol identical to the Primary Server
On-demand activation
Workflow for on-demand activation
Deploy & Activate Primary Server
configure self-backup location and protocol
Deploy Standby Server
configure self-backup location (cannot test connection until activated)
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