Overview

Active/Passive and Active/Active deployment topologies in Automation Suite, including diagrams and hardware requirements.

Diagrams

The following diagram depicts a regular Active/Passive deployment of Automation Suite:

The following diagram depicts a regular Active/Active deployment of Automation Suite:

Requirements

The following hardware components are required for Active/Passive and Active/Active deployments.

Global Traffic Manager (GTM)

The GTM distributes traffic across your Automation Suite multi-site deployment. It must be highly available and immune to failure at any single deployment site. The GTM must also support health checks that isolate a faulty site quickly. The GTM is not mandatory, but it is recommended for a quick switchover.

When configuring the GTM for Active/Passive or Active/Active deployments, use /orchestrator_/api/status as the health endpoint. This is critical for effective disaster recovery management.

Load balancer

Every site needs a local load balancer that can load-balance traffic to any node configured in the same site. For details, refer to Configuring the load balancer.

Node

Every site must have at least three servers; agent nodes are optional. The exact number of machines depends on the machine size and overall capacity requirements. You do not need to bring the same set of nodes to each cluster.

For Active/Active configurations, the secondary cluster can be smaller, since you might install only a few products. For details, refer to Automation Suite Install Sizing Calculator.

SQL database

An external SQL server is required to store the data. For disaster recovery, you need Always On Availability Groups with a primary SQL server in Site 1 and at least one secondary SQL server physically located in Site 2, with data sync enabled. A SQL listener is deployed on top of the SQL server, and both clusters are configured to use the address of the same listener.

PostgreSQL database

PostgreSQL is used only by Process Mining. Process Mining is not supported in Active/Passive or Active/Active mode, so its Airflow database does not need to be persisted to the secondary site. No cross-site PostgreSQL replication is required for disaster recovery.

Objectstore

Any files or packages uploaded to products are stored in the objectstore. For greater resilience to failure, Automation Suite deployments require an external objectstore.

For effective disaster recovery, two objectstore instances are required, one in each data center. At any given time, only one objectstore instance must be actively used for reading and writing by both clusters, complemented by asynchronous replication to the secondary instance.

High Availability Add-on

For Active/Active, High Availability Add-on must be external to Automation Suite and installed on separate machines. A minimum of three nodes is required for each High Availability Add-on instance in both data centers, configured in different clusters and synchronized through CRDB replication. To install High Availability Add-on, refer to the High Availability Add-on Installation Guide.

For Active/Passive, High Availability Add-on is installed within the Automation Suite cluster. You must still enable it on both clusters by providing the HAA license. For details, refer to Enabling Redis High Availability Add-On for the cluster.

Elasticsearch (optional)

Elasticsearch is required to send the robot logs. You can configure Elasticsearch cross-site replication as described by Elasticsearch.