I'm looking at putting in some vCO appliances, and one of the open questions I've got is how they should be configured for failover and how to do backups.
The configuration looks like this:
External DB
- Microsoft SQL Server setup with two nodes using async mirroring to the backup node.
- vCO instances will access the DB using a CNAME to avoid reconfiguration in a failover scenario.
- Standard database backups etc will be managed by DBA staff.
- Disabling postgres when deploying the vAPP
Active Directory Authentication
- Using standard active directory auth as described in the vendor documentation
- Disabling openldap when deploying the vAPP
vCO Appliance
- Running two appliance instances one local to the active DB instance one local to the remote instance.
- Don't really require HA / Clustering day 1, just a "DR" solution where if the primary site has an outage I can spin up the backup site and change my CNAMEs and be back online
Is it worth it to bother with the clustering configuration in this kind of setup? I have some test servers running in cluster mode, but it doesn't appear there is any easy way to designate a specific instance to always be the primary. Also I don't currently have a need for multiple instances in the active site so it doesn't seem like it would be of much benefit.
Aside from the database backup what else should be backed up as part of the configuration of the appliance? Is just doing a configuration export and backing up the contents of that after configuration changes enough? Do I need to get into the appliance and backup anything at all? I'd prefer if I could just deploy a fresh appliance and configure it in the scenario where the appliance is trashed I just need to know if only the database and config export is enough to achieve this.
Is there an automated way to do the configuration export? I didn't see any workflows which looked like they might allow this.
