- Overview
- Requirements
- Recommended: Deployment templates
- Manual: Preparing the installation
- Manual: Preparing the installation
- Step 1: Configuring the OCI-compliant registry for offline installations
- Step 2: Configuring the external objectstore
- Step 3: Configuring High Availability Add-on
- Step 4: Configuring Microsoft SQL Server
- Step 5: Configuring the load balancer
- Step 6: Configuring the DNS
- Step 7: Configuring the disks
- Step 8: Configuring kernel and OS level settings
- Step 9: Configuring the node ports
- Step 10: Applying miscellaneous settings
- Step 12: Validating and installing the required RPM packages
- Step 13: Generating cluster_config.json
- Cluster_config.json Sample
- General configuration
- Profile configuration
- Certificate configuration
- Database configuration
- External Objectstore configuration
- Pre-signed URL configuration
- ArgoCD configuration
- External OCI-compliant registry configuration
- Disaster recovery: Active/Passive and Active/Active configurations
- High Availability Add-on configuration
- Orchestrator-specific configuration
- Insights-specific configuration
- Process Mining-specific configuration
- Document Understanding-specific configuration
- Automation Suite Robots-specific configuration
- AI Center-specific configuration
- Monitoring configuration
- Optional: Configuring the proxy server
- Optional: Enabling resilience to zonal failures in a multi-node HA-ready production cluster
- Optional: Passing custom resolv.conf
- Optional: Increasing fault tolerance
- Adding a dedicated agent node with GPU support
- Adding a dedicated agent Node for Task Mining
- Connecting Task Mining application
- Adding a Dedicated Agent Node for Automation Suite Robots
- Step 15: Configuring the temporary Docker registry for offline installations
- Step 16: Validating the prerequisites for the installation
- Manual: Performing the installation
- Post-installation
- Cluster administration
- Managing products
- Getting Started with the Cluster Administration portal
- Migrating objectstore from persistent volume to raw disks
- Migrating from in-cluster to external High Availability Add-on
- Migrating data between objectstores
- Migrating in-cluster objectstore to external objectstore
- Migrating to an external OCI-compliant registry
- Switching to the secondary cluster manually in an Active/Passive setup
- Disaster Recovery: Performing post-installation operations
- Converting an existing installation to multi-site setup
- Guidelines on upgrading an Active/Passive or Active/Active deployment
- Guidelines on backing up and restoring an Active/Passive or Active/Active deployment
- Monitoring and alerting
- Migration and upgrade
- Migrating between Automation Suite clusters
- Upgrading Automation Suite
- Downloading the installation packages and getting all the files on the first server node
- Retrieving the latest applied configuration from the cluster
- Updating the cluster configuration
- Configuring the OCI-compliant registry for offline installations
- Executing the upgrade
- Performing post-upgrade operations
- Applying a patch
- Product-specific configuration
- Best practices and maintenance
- Troubleshooting
- How to troubleshoot services during installation
- How to uninstall the cluster
- How to clean up offline artifacts to improve disk space
- How to clear Redis data
- How to enable Istio logging
- How to manually clean up logs
- How to clean up old logs stored in the sf-logs bucket
- How to disable streaming logs for AI Center
- How to debug failed Automation Suite installations
- How to delete images from the old installer after upgrade
- How to disable TX checksum offloading
- How to manually set the ArgoCD log level to Info
- How to expand AI Center storage
- How to generate the encoded pull_secret_value for external registries
- How to address weak ciphers in TLS 1.2
- How to check the TLS version
- Unable to run an offline installation on RHEL 8.4 OS
- Error in downloading the bundle
- Offline installation fails because of missing binary
- Certificate issue in offline installation
- SQL connection string validation error
- Prerequisite check for selinux iscsid module fails
- Azure disk not marked as SSD
- Failure after certificate update
- Antivirus causes installation issues
- Automation Suite not working after OS upgrade
- Automation Suite requires backlog_wait_time to be set to 0
- Volume unable to mount due to not being ready for workloads
- Support bundle log collection failure
- Single-node upgrade fails at the fabric stage
- Upgrade fails due to unhealthy Ceph
- RKE2 not getting started due to space issue
- Volume unable to mount and remains in attach/detach loop state
- Upgrade fails due to classic objects in the Orchestrator database
- Ceph cluster found in a degraded state after side-by-side upgrade
- Unhealthy Insights component causes the migration to fail
- Service upgrade fails for Apps
- In-place upgrade timeouts
- Docker registry migration stuck in PVC deletion stage
- AI Center provisioning failure after upgrading to 2023.10 or later
- Upgrade fails in offline environments
- SQL validation fails during upgrade
- snapshot-controller-crds pod in CrashLoopBackOff state after upgrade
- Setting a timeout interval for the management portals
- Authentication not working after migration
- Kinit: Cannot find KDC for realm <AD Domain> while getting initial credentials
- Kinit: Keytab contains no suitable keys for *** while getting initial credentials
- GSSAPI operation failed due to invalid status code
- Alarm received for failed Kerberos-tgt-update job
- SSPI provider: Server not found in Kerberos database
- Login failed for AD user due to disabled account
- ArgoCD login failed
- Update the underlying directory connections
- Failure to get the sandbox image
- Pods not showing in ArgoCD UI
- Redis probe failure
- RKE2 server fails to start
- Secret not found in UiPath namespace
- ArgoCD goes into progressing state after first installation
- MongoDB pods in CrashLoopBackOff or pending PVC provisioning after deletion
- Pods stuck in Init:0/X
- Missing Ceph-rook metrics from monitoring dashboards
- Running High Availability with Process Mining
- Process Mining ingestion failed when logged in using Kerberos
- After Disaster Recovery Dapr is not working properly for Process Mining and Task Mining
- Unable to connect to AutomationSuite_ProcessMining_Warehouse database using a pyodbc format connection string
- Airflow installation fails with sqlalchemy.exc.ArgumentError: Could not parse rfc1738 URL from string ''
- How to add an IP table rule to use SQL Server port 1433
- Automation Suite certificate is not trusted from the server where CData Sync is running
- Running the diagnostics tool
- Using the Automation Suite support bundle
- Exploring Logs
Basic architecture considerations
As with any multi-site deployment, the primary architecture considerations for Automation Suite account for infrastructure, latency, data source, management, Recovery Time Objective, Recovery Point Objective, etc.
We recommend using the same hardware for both clusters. However, the Automation Suite cluster will likely work with similar hardware configurations with little difference. Heterogeneous hardware may increase complexity and slow down troubleshooting.
Latency holds crucial importance in designing an Active/Active model. It denotes the round-trip time (RTT) between the two Automation Suite clusters. A minimal latency level between the two sites is optimal as it greatly reduces the risk of data loss during an outage. The RTT must fall beneath a threshold of 10ms.
You should rigurously test the RTT prior to moving into the production stage, due to its direct effect on performance metrics. If the latency exceeds the 10ms benchmark between the pair of sites, we recommend considering an Active/Passive setup rather than an Active/Active configuration.
Any component that requires synchronization should have an RTT less than 10ms. This includes SQL servers, HAA, objectstore, etc.
The two Automation Suite clusters are independent and do not share any configuration. Therefore, any management or maintenance activity must be done individually on these clusters. For instance, you must update the SQL connection strings on both clusters, configure certificates separately, etc. In addition, you must monitor the two clusters independently, upgrade them individually, etc.
The objectstore, combined with the SQL database, forms the state of an installed product on Automation Suite.
SQL Server configuration plays a vital role in a multi-site deployment. Though SQL Server is a component external to Automation Suite, a few additional steps are required to ensure true HA when working with Automation Suite.
MultiSubnetFailover=True property in the connection string when the SQL server/databases are distributed across multiple subnets.
For more details, see Always On availability groups and Prerequisites, Restrictions, and Recommendations for Always On availability groups.
The external objectstore is immune to possible corruption due to node failure. Data replication and disaster recovery can be carried out independently of Automation Suite. Like SQL Server, the external objectstore must be configured in a highly available Disaster Recovery setup. The primary objectstore instance is physically located in the primary data center, and at least one secondary instance is located in the secondary data center with data sync enabled. You can configure a load balancer on the objectstore to ensure both Automation Suite clusters refer to the same endpoints. This makes the deployment independent of how the objectstore is configured internally.
For AWS S3, the multi-region access point does not support all the s3 APIs required by all the products running in Automation Suite. For details on the list of support APIs, see Using Multi-Region Access Points with supported API operations.
You can create two buckets per product/suite in both regions and enable synchronization. The Automation Suite cluster running in the same region will refer to the buckets in the same region.
Your organization’s policy around RTO is vital in designing your multi-site Automation Suite cluster. To achieve the desired RTO, take the following aspects into consideration:
- Design of the Traffic Manager;
- Availability of the nodes in the secondary/passive cluster;
- Dynamic workload availability on the secondary cluster; for example, MLSkill;
- Configuration Management.
To unlock the full potential of both clusters, it is crucial to configure the Traffic Manager appropriately. The setup should ideally facilitate the distribution of traffic to both clusters. This strategy not only ensures a balanced load distribution, but also safeguards business continuity, mitigating any potential disruptiveness if either site experiences a complete shutdown.
In the event of a disaster that results in one site becoming entirely non-operational, the other site must have enough capacity to ensure that business automation is not impacted. Insufficient capacity at the functioning site may negatively affect the running of the business and potentially lead to significant operational issues.
A few products, such as AI Center, deploy the ML Skills dynamically at the runtime. The deployment of the skills in another cluster is always asynchronous. This cannot guarantee their availability. To ensure that your automation solution returns online within the desired time, you can periodically sync the skills in another cluster.
Since multi-site Automation Suite deployments consist of two distinct clusters, any operation performed on any cluster must be performed on the other cluster in time to reduce the drift. This ensures that both clusters possess similar configurations and that no additional effort is required during recovery.
Your organization’s policy around Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is vital in designing your multi-site Automation Suite cluster. To achieve the desired RPO, you must take the following aspects into account:
- Data synchronization;
- Scheduled backup.
When written to the primary data source, data must also be synced to the secondary cluster. However, there is a risk of data loss when the data center is down, and data is not synced. Exemplary network configurations, such as high bandwidth and low latency between the two data centers, can speed up synchronization.
Not all disaster recovery provides complete immunity to data loss. However, you can deploy a regular and periodic backup strategy to minimize the impact of the disaster on data recovery. For details, see Backing up and restoring the cluster.
