High Availability and Disaster Recovery with Red Hat Ansible Tower

Updated -

Issue

I need to configure high availability and/or disaster recovery with Red Hat Ansible Tower.

Resolution

Note: this information applies to all supported versions of Ansible Tower.

What is the preferred way to enable high availability of Red Hat Ansible Tower?

When using Ansible Tower, the preferred mechanism for providing single-site high availability is by using Ansible Tower clustering for redundant execution capacity in the case of the failure of an Ansible Tower node.

Note that the database is still deployed as a single node when installing Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower can utilize an existing HA database solution provided by the customer, subject to the Red Hat Ansible Tower Database Scope of Support.

What is the preferred way to enable disaster recovery of Red Hat Ansible Tower?

When using Ansible Tower, the preferred mechanism for providing multi-site disaster recovery is via a defined failover process. In this process, the database is replicated to a secondary site via one of:
- database replication
- storage replication
- virtual machine snapshots

On failover, the secondary site is made primary at the database level, and new Ansible Tower nodes are installed (or powered on), and registered into the Tower cluster. There should not be active Tower nodes in the secondary site before failover; only one site must be active at a time. When using Ansible Tower deployments in OpenShift Container Platform, a new pod deployment can be done, configured to use the now-primary database; no nodes need to be installed.

Due to the variety and complexities of each customer environment, specific instructions for the replication and failover process are not included or supported as part of a Red Hat Ansible Automation subscription. Red Hat Consulting has a standard architecture for multi-site failover that can be deployed and customized to customer specifications. If you have a need for additional assistance beyond what’s denoted here, please contact your account representative to determine the best use of Ansible and Red Hat service resources to achieve success for your project.

Comments