Appliance redundancy

Because CloudBolt is easily installed and upgraded in a matter of minutes, the need for appliance redundancy is solely driven by the high availability requirements at the company where it's deployed. While it's possible to run CloudBolt's database outside of the appliance in a DB Cluster and have multiple instances of the framework server accessed through a load balancer, the level of complexity to create and maintain such setup makes it less than desirable for the majority of the customers. For customers looking for simple strategies for appliance redundancy, the suggestions are:

 

Hot Stand-by

• Install a secondary CloudBolt appliance.    
• Turn off cron-based jobs.    
• Setup rsync to replicate:
• the data in the database from the primary appliance.
• the contents of /var/opt/cloudbolt
• the contents of /var/www/html/cloudbolt/static/uploads
• At the end of every synchronization run collectstatic on the secondary appliance
• Every time the primary appliance is upgraded, also upgrade the backup.

 

Cold Stand-by

• Install a secondary CloudBolt appliance.
• Leave it powered-off, might have it configured with same IP as the primary
• Save a copy of the latest upgrader package run against the primary appliance

 

*A variation of the cold stand-by strategy is to have no stand-by at all, and instead re-deploy from the OFV if needed.

Data Backup (redundant if using a hot stand-by)

While it’s trivial to create the primary appliance from any of the methods described in the previous section, one should make sure than can also restore to the new appliance all their data, extensions, hook modules, license file and any other configurations necessary.  Data and configuration restoration is also very simple if you make sure to back-up all three main areas of CloudBolt.  The suggested process is to run a daily script in the appliance that creates a tarball and rsyncs it to a remote location.

 

The tarball should contain:

• A database dump - mysqldump

#mysqldump --user=root --password=[your_db_password] cloudbolt > ~/dump-[date/name].sql

• A copy of the contents of /var/opt/cloudbolt/
• A copy of the contents of /var/www/html/cloudbolt/static/uploads

 

Restore Instructions

• Power on the cold stand-by mentioned on the first section, or re-deploy from OVA
• (If necessary) Download/run upgrader to bring the c2 version current
• Reset db and load from backup of mysqldbdump

#/opt/cloudbolt/manage.py reset_db #mysql --user=root --password=[your_db_password] cloudbolt < [your_backup_file]

• Overwrite /var/opt/cloudbolt with contents from backup tarball
• Overwrite /var/www/html/cloudbolt/static/uploads contents from backup tarbal
• Run /opt/cloudbolt/manage.py collectstatic
• Restart httpd