Preparing the management subsystem for disaster recovery on VMware

Prepare a Management subsystem for disaster recovery by taking specific steps before and after the installation of the subsystem.

About this task

This task must be performed before any disaster event occurs, and also prior to the installation of a replacement Management subsystem during the recovery process. Best practice is to complete these steps immediately after initial configuration of a management subsystem during your original v10 deployment.
Any local backups are presumed to have been lost in the disaster scenario and are non-recoverable in this procedure.

Note: This procedure is for API Connect version 10.0.1.2-eus or higher. For 10.0.1.1-eus, see Preparing the management subsystem for disaster recovery on VMware using S3 backups (10.0.1.1-eus). For 10.0.1.0-eus, see Preparing the management subsystem for disaster recovery on VMware (10.0.1.0-eus)

Important: Successful disaster recovery depends on recovery of both the Management subsystem and the Developer Portal subsystem. You must complete preparation steps for both subsystems in order to achieve disaster recovery. If you have to perform a restore, you must complete the restoration of the Management Service first, and then immediately restore the Developer Portal. Therefore, the backups of the Management and Portal must be taken at the same time, to ensure that the Portal sites are consistent with Management database.

Procedure

Download v10_ova_dr_files-<version>.tgz from IBM Fix Central.
Uncompress this file to access dr-preparation-py.zip. Uncompress the zip, which contains a Python script that you will use to capture important information. For example:
```
$ unzip dr-preparation.py.zip
```

Copy (scp) the Python script to the management system, and run it:

python3 dr-preparation

The script creates the output file apicup-commands.txt with commands that you will use later to create the secrets necessary to recover the management subsystem.

Example output when the script runs without error:

apicup certs set management atm-credential --encoded-string '<encoded_string>'
apicup certs set management consumer-toolkit-credential --encoded-string '<encoded_string>'
apicup certs set management designer-credential --encoded-string '<encoded_string>'
apicup certs set management toolkit-credential --encoded-string '<encoded_string>'
apicup certs set management juhu-credential --encoded-string '<encoded_string>'
apicup certs set management consumer-ui-credential --encoded-string '<encoded_string>'
apicup certs set management ui-credential --encoded-string '<encoded_string>'
apicup certs set management encryption-secret --encoded-string '<encoded_string>'
apicup subsys set management site-name='<site_name>'

Note: If any of the secrets are missing, the script will display an error message. You must resolve the errors before continuing, or you cannot successfully recover from a disaster event.

Save the apicup-commands.txt to your local machine for later reference.
Backup your version 10 management subsystem:
- For backup configuration, see Configuring backup settings during initial installation of the management subsystem (10.0.1.1-eus or greater).
- If scheduled backups were configured during backup configuration, you should have access to a backup on the specified cloud storage.
- You can perform a manual backup at any time by creating a manual backup CR. See Backing up the management subsystem.
Optional: Take a Virtual Machine (VM) snapshot of all your VMs; see Using VM snapshots for infrastructure backup and disaster recovery for details. This action does require a brief outage while all of the VMs in the subsystem cluster are shut down - do not take snapshots of running VMs, as they might not restore successfully. VM snapshots can offer a faster recovery when compared to redeploying OVAs and restoring from normal backups.

Important: VM snapshots are not an alternative to the standard backups that are described in the previous steps, and which must be taken in order to use the API Connect restore feature.

What to do next

You should now complete the preparation steps for the Developer Portal subsystem; see Preparing the Developer Portal subsystem for disaster recovery on VMware.