High Availability with Red Hat Satellite 6.11+

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

  • Red Hat Satellite 6.11+

Issue

  • How to configure a Red Hat Satellite 6.11 and above with high availability and/or disaster recovery?

Resolution

NOTE: This article applies to Satellite 6.11 and above and this concern is being tracked as a feature request in This content is not included.JIRA SAT-2071.

  • What is the preferred way to enable high availability of Red Hat Satellite 6?

    • When using Satellite 6 the preferred method of providing intra-site high availability is to virtualize the Satellite and Capsule servers and use the hypervisor tools to provide high availability of the virtual machine hosting the Satellite or Capsule.
    • This combination of virtualized Satellite and Capsule servers and an HA-capable hypervisor can provide high availability in case of an outage event and doesn't require any special configuration on the Satellite or Capsule.

Note: Due to the variety of different hypervisors and their related capabilities, Red Hat does not provide explicit instructions and support for configuring HA on products not engineered by Red Hat. Please refer to your hypervisor vendor's documentation for configuring HA.

  • What is the preferred way to enable disaster recovery of Red Hat Satellite 6?

    • The advice for this use case is very similar, but for disaster recovery, we need to go into a few more details. It is still recommended to virtualize the Satellite Server on your hypervisor of choice. To provide inter-site disaster recovery of the virtual machine running Satellite you should leverage virtual machine replication, making sure that the hostname of the Satellite Server does not change. It is fine for the IP address to change during failover/failback as long as the hostname does not change.
    • Another option is to take regular backups of the Satellite Server using satellite-backup/katello-backup/foreman-maintain/satellite-maintain backup and pre-stage them on your remote site. This way you can have relatively recent information available off-site in the event that your primary site goes offline.

    A note about Satellite backups

    • As of Satellite 6.3 and later, you can take snapshot-based backups which use Logical Volume Manager (LVM) snapshots of the Pulp, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL directories. Snapshot-based backups significantly reduce the amount of service downtime needed to complete a backup. Note that the snapshot backup functionality is removed from Red Hat Satellite 6.16. Perform a full backup instead.

    • Detailed information about Snapshot Backups can be found in Chapter 11 of the Administering Red Hat Satellite Guide.
      Note: Snapshots taken during the Satellite backup process are true backups that can be used to recover the Satellite Server. Hypervisor-level snapshots should not be relied upon for this purpose.

  • What other options are there for Satellite HA?

    • Using the hypervisor HA is the supported method for Satellite 6.
    • Satellite 6.4 also introduced load balancing capsules, which document a supported method to set up your Satellite 6.4 and above capsules in a configuration that can be used with load balancers. Please refer to the Load Balancing Guide for additional information.

  • Why was the old Satellite HA Reference Architecture removed?

    • After receiving feedback from customers who have deployed this reference architecture, Red Hat believes that it did not solve the availability and recovering time requirements of our customers.

  • I have my Satellite environment configured using the old Satellite HA Reference Architecture. How do I upgrade to Satellite 6.3 or later?

    • If you are a Satellite customer that deployed Satellite in an HA configuration using an older reference architecture document (not using hypervisor HA), then you should contact your account team for options. The older reference architecture method is challenging to upgrade properly and your account team would need to discuss the options available to upgrade to a newer version.
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