Chef Automate Disaster Recovery

Danger

This documentation applies to a deprecated product. Chef Automate includes newer out-of-the-box compliance profiles, an improved compliance scanner with total cloud scanning functionality, better visualizations, role-based access control and many other features. Chef Automate is included as part of the Workflow license agreement and is available via subscription.

Use a standby Chef Automate server to protect against the loss of the primary Chef Automate server. A standby Chef Automate server is configured to replicate data from the primary Chef Automate server. In the event of loss of the primary Chef Automate server, the standby is then reconfigured to become the primary.

Note

Disaster Recovery for Chef Automate pertains to the workflow capabilities only. Also, these instructions assume that the primary and standby servers are in the same data center. If they are in different geographical locations additional considerations are necessary, as well as tuning the configuration to account for latency between data centers.

Requirements

A disaster recovery configuration for Chef Automate has the following requirements:

Two identically-configured Chef Automate servers, one to act as the primary server and the other to act as a standby
Note
You cannot log in to the Chef Automate web UI on the standby server.
SSH access between both Chef Automate servers via port 22
PostgreSQL replication allowed between both Chef Automate servers via port 5432
The latest version of ChefDK is installed on the provisioning node
A Chef Automate license

Install a Standby Chef Automate Server

The following steps describe how to manually install a Chef Automate server for use as a standby.

Note

Look for items delimited with <BRACKETS>. Replace the bracketed words (and the brackets) with the correct values for your configuration. All files require default permissions, unless noted. All commands must be run as the root user or by using sudo.

Provision a standby server that is exactly the same as the existing Chef Automate server.
Download the Chef Automate package to the standby server: https://downloads.chef.io/automate/.
As a root user, install the Chef Automate package on the server, using the name of the package provided by Chef.
For Debian:
```
dpkg -i $PATH_TO_AUTOMATE_SERVER_PACKAGE
```
For Red Hat or Centos:
```
rpm -Uvh $PATH_TO_AUTOMATE_SERVER_PACKAGE
```
After a few minutes, Chef Automate will be installed.
Create the license directory:
```
sudo mkdir -p /var/opt/delivery/license
```
and then copy the delivery.license file that exists in the /var/opt/delivery/license directory on the primary Chef Automate server into the license directory.
Create the configuration directory:
```
sudo mkdir -p /etc/delivery
```

Edit the /etc/delivery/delivery.rb file:

sudo vi /etc/delivery/delivery.rb ## you may use any editor you wish

and add the following settings:

delivery_fqdn "<AUTOMATE_URL>"

delivery['chef_username']    = "delivery"
delivery['chef_private_key'] = "/etc/delivery/delivery.pem"
delivery['chef_server']      = "https://<CHEF_SERVER_URL>/organizations/delivery"

delivery['default_search']   = "((recipes:delivery_build OR recipes:delivery_build\\\\:\\\\:default) AND chef_environment:_default)"

delivery['primary'] = false
delivery['primary_ip'] = '<PRIMARY_IP_ADDRESS>'
postgresql['listen_address'] = 'localhost,<STANDBY_IP_ADDRESS>'

where PRIMARY_IP_ADDRESS, STANDBY_IP_ADDRESS, and AUTOMATE_URL, CHEF_SERVER_URL should be replaced with the actual values for the Chef Automate configuration. The PRIMARY_IP_ADDRESS and STANDBY_IP_ADDRESS values should be from a private network between the two machines.

Create a directory for the SSH key–if one is not already present–on the primary Chef Automate server:
```
sudo mkdir -p /opt/delivery/embedded/.ssh
```
Create a private key on the primary Chef Automate server. This key is used for file synchronization between the two servers. It will be created in /opt/delivery/embedded/.ssh and must not contain a passphrase.
Move into the directory:
```
cd /opt/delivery/embedded/.ssh
```
then generate the key:
```
sudo ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "<EMAIL_ADDRESS>"
```
and then save to a file (don’t overwrite anything) and note the filename for later.
On the standby server, create the directory /opt/delivery/embedded/.ssh/authorized_keys:
```
sudo mkdir -p /opt/delivery/embedded/.ssh/authorized_keys
```
Copy the public key (from the key pair created above) to /opt/delivery/embedded/.ssh/authorized_keys on the standby server:

On the primary Chef Automate server edit the /etc/delivery/delivery.rb file to add the following:

delivery['primary'] = true
postgresql['trust_auth_cidr_addresses'] = [ '127.0.0.1/32',
                                            '::1/128',
                                            '<PRIMARY_IP_ADDRESS>/32',
                                            '<STANDBY_IP_ADDRESS>/32'
                                          ]
postgresql['listen_address'] = 'localhost,<PRIMARY_IP_ADDRESS>'
delivery['standby_ip'] = '<STANDBY_IP_ADDRESS>'
lsyncd['ssh_key'] = '/opt/delivery/embedded/.ssh/<PRIVATE_KEY>'

where PRIMARY_IP_ADDRESS, STANDBY_IP_ADDRESS, and PRIVATE_KEY should be replaced with the actual values for the Chef Automate configuration. The PRIMARY_IP_ADDRESS and STANDBY_IP_ADDRESS values should be from a private network between the two machines.

Copy the following files from the /etc/delivery/ directory on the primary Chef Automate server to the standby: delivery.pem, builder_key, builder_key.pub, and delivery-secrets.json. And then verify that builder_key, builder_key.pub, and delivery-secrets.json have a mode of 600.
On the standby server, create the /etc/chef/trusted_certs directory:
```
sudo mkdir -p /etc/chef/trusted_certs
```
Copy all of the files in /etc/chef/trusted_certs/ from the primary Chef Automate server to the same directory on the standby server.
Create the /var/opt/delivery/nginx/ca/ directory on the standby server:
```
sudo mkdir -p /var/opt/delivery/nginx/ca/
```
Copy all contents of /var/opt/delivery/nginx/ca/ from the primary Chef Automate server to the same directory on the standby server.
Run the following command on the primary Chef Automate server:
```
sudo automate-ctl reconfigure
```
Run the following command on the standby Chef Automate server:
```
sudo automate-ctl reconfigure
```

Disaster Recovery

In most scenarios, converting the standby Chef Automate server to a standalone configuration is the simplest way to get Chef Automate itself back up and running, after which you can rebuild a standby server, update the IP address for the standby server, and then reconfigure the Chef Automate configuration to have a primary and standby server.

Failover the Chef Automate Server

To promote a standby Chef Automate server to primary, do the following:

Log into the standby Chef Automate server (via SSH, and not the Chef Automate web UI) and make a backup of the data:
```
sudo automate-ctl create-backup
```
Move this data to a location that is not on the standby Chef Automate server.
If the primary Chef Automate server is still accessible, log into it and run the following command as the root user:
```
automate-ctl stop
```
Convert the standby server to a standalone Chef Automate server. Update the delivery["primary"], delivery["primary_ip"], and postgresql["listen_address"] settings in the /etc/delivery/delivery.rb file to be similar to:
```
delivery["primary"] = false
delivery["primary_ip"] = '192.0.2.0'
postgresql["listen_address"] = 'localhost,192.0.2.0'
```
On the standby server, run the following command as the root user:
```
automate-ctl reconfigure
```
This will reconfigure the server to become a standalone Chef Automate server, after which a new standby server can be installed and configured to be the new standby.
Set the DNS/load balancer to redirect traffic to the new primary Chef Automate server, as required.

Recreate the Standby

Recreating the standby Chef Automate server requires the following steps:

Deleting the old primary server
Updating configuration if SSH provisioning is being used
Installing a Chef Automate server to act as a standby

Delete the Primary

To delete the failed primary, do the following:

Log in to the Chef Infra Server and delete the primary Chef Automate server node and client.
Delete or destroy the primary Chef Automate machine.

Configure SSH

If provisioning uses the SSH driver, do the following:

Remove the disaster recovery block in the Chef Automate cluster.
Set the correct IP address for new primary node.

Run the following command:

rm .chef/provisioning/ssh/delivery-server-test.json

Reinstall Standby

To set up a new standby Chef Automate server, follow the same steps for installing the Chef Automate server (either manually or using the delivery-cluster cookbook), as described earlier in this topic.