Disaster recovery - Installing the secondary cluster

To install the secondary Automation Suite cluster in an Active/Passive or Active/Active deployment, take the following steps.

1. Generate or copy the cluster_config.json file from the primary Automation Suite cluster to one of the nodes identified as the server in the secondary Automation Suite cluster. For more details, see Generating or copying the cluster_config.json of the primary cluster.
2. Update the cluster_config.json file with the parameters specific to the secondary Automation Suite cluster.

3. Resume the Automation Suite installation.

4. Switch off inactive products if you use an Active/Passive configuration.

Generating or copying the cluster_config.json of the primary cluster

Generate a new cluster_config.json file or copy it from the primary cluster.

1. Log into any server node and become root:

   ssh <username>@<machine_ip>
   
   sudo su -
   
   export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/rancher/rke2/bin
   export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/rke2/rke2.yaml

2. Generate the cluster_config.json file if you do not have one:

   ./bin/uipathctl manifest get-revision >> /path/to/new/cluster_config.json

3. Copy the cluster_config.json file to a server nodes in the secondary cluster:

   scp /path/to/new/cluster_config.json <username>@<primary_machine_ip>:<username>@<secondary_machine_ip>

Updating the cluster_config.json

Update the cluster_config.json file with the parameters specific to the secondary Automation Suite cluster by taking the following steps:

1. Turn off the unsupported products.
   Set all the products that are not supported in multi-site to false.

   • For an Active/Passive configuration, disable the following products:

     {
       "test_manager": {
         "enabled": false
       },
       "process_mining": {
         "enabled": false
       },
       "automation_hub": {
         "enabled": false
       },
       "insights": {
         "enabled": false
       }
     }

   • For an Active/Active configuration, disable all products except Orchestrator.

   Note:

   Make sure that you enable the platform service as shown in the following example:

   "platform": {
       "enabled": true
     },

2. Generate the kubeconfig of the primary cluster. This is required to access a few of the configurations by the secondary cluster made on the primary cluster. To get the kubeconfig file with the limited permission related to disaster recovery, run the following command:

   ./bin/uipathctl config kubeconfig get --multisite

   Copy the value provided in the command output. This value is required in the next step.

3. Update the cluster_config.json file with the parameters specific to the secondary cluster. For details, see Advanced installation experience.
4. Generate a new GUID for rke_token to prevent the secondary cluster from joining the primary cluster. To do that, run the following command:

   LC_CTYPE=C tr </dev/urandom -dc '!@#$%q_A-Z-a-z-0-9' | head -c 16

Resume the installation

Once the parameters in the previous step are provided or modified in the cluster_config.json, you can resume the installation as instructed in Installing Automation Suite.

Note:

You must perform the Automation Suite installation using the uipathctl installer. Note that you do not need to generate a new cluster_config.json.

Switching off inactive products

If you deployed Automation Suite in Active/Passive mode, you can scale down the cluster and switch off inactive products using the following command. This step is not required if you opt for an Active/Active setup.

./bin/uipathctl config products scale-down