Backing up and restoring the cluster

Automation Suite supports the backup and restore functionality to prevent data loss in various scenarios. You can configure a backup any time post-installation.

To use the backup and restore functionality, you must enable an NFS server, backup cluster, and restore cluster. These concepts are defined in the following section.

Terminology

NFS Server – The server that stores the backup data and facilitates the restoration. You can set up the NFS server on any machine or a PaaS service offered by cloud providers. Note that we do not support Windows-based NFS and Azure blob-based NFS.

Backup Cluster – The cluster you set up to install Automation Suite. This is the cluster where you will enable the backup.

Restore Cluster – The cluster where you restore all the data from the backup cluster. This becomes the new cluster where you run Automation Suite once the restore process is complete.

Prerequisites

Note:

• This setup will only enable a backup of the cluster, including cluster configuration and data stored as part of the in-cluster block storage in /datadisk and objectstore data disks attached to server machines.

  However, this will not enable the backup of any external data sources, such as the SQL database and external objectstore. You must enable the external data source backup separately.

• If you want to add new server nodes after enabling the backup, make sure you configure the NFS server to allow access to the new node.

To set up the backup and restore functionality, you must meet the following requirements:

• You must use NFSv3 or NFSv4 on Linux.

• You must set up the NFS server on a separate machine hosted outside of the backup and restore cluster.
• There must not be more than 10-millisecond Round Trip Time (RTT) latency between the NFS server and the backup and restore cluster.
• The cluster you want to back up and the NFS server must be in the same region.

• The NFS server must meet the following hardware requirements:

  CPU	RAM	Disk
  4(v-) CPU	8 GiB	1 TiB SSD (1100 IOPS)

• The NFS server must be reachable from all the cluster nodes.

• You must enable the following ports on the NFS server and all the nodes in the backup cluster. When restoring the cluster, the same ports must be open on all the nodes in the restore cluster.

  Port	Protocol	Purpose
  2049	TCP	Bidirectional communication between the NFS server and the backup and restore cluster. This is the port on which the NFS server will run.
  111	TCP	Bidirectional communication between the NFS server and the backup and restore cluster. This port is used for rpcbind between the NFS server and the backup and restore cluster.