Chapter 1. Executive Summary

Application high availability is a top subject for most enterprise IT environments. Downtime incurs unplanned expenses and creates frustration for both consumers and providers.

This reference architecture focuses on implementing a highly available configuration for Red Hat CloudForms.[1] by configuring the CloudForms database for a replicated setup with one master and one hot standby server.

A hot standby configuration provides the following:

  • Software components are installed and available on both primary and secondary nodes. The software components on the secondary system are up but will not process data or requests
  • Data is mirrored in near real time and both systems will have identical data. Data replication is typically done through the software’s capabilities and generally provides a recovery time of a few seconds

For the reference environment the following technologies are used:

  • NFS storage is provided by NetApp filers using SnapMirror technologies
  • Virtual IP(VIP) along with DNS round-robin and load balancing provided by F5 Networks
  • Clustering technologies provided by Red Hat

The targeted use case includes:

  • Configuring a highly available Red Hat CloudForms implementation within a single datacenter, using Red Hat cluster services to provide a highly available database for each region
Note

Disclaimer: Third party products are not supported by Red Hat and are supported by the respective vendors. Custom scripts and other information shared are for informational/educational purposes. Refer to the Red Hat Production Support Scope of Coverage.[2] for additional information.