Here’s how we enabled load balancing and high availability clustering on cloud with automated data replication for a Manufacturing firm on SUSE and SAP HANA
Customer Challenges
The customer, a manufacturing firm had a cloud hosted application.
- During heavy data traffic, the application was unable to scale dynamically to support the traffic
- Since automated backup was not available, daily manual back up was getting very time consuming as the application data was growing in volume.
- Any network or hardware failure, resulted in unexpected interruption was unavailable. The downtime in the application incurred huge monitory losses.
Key Technologies
- Ubuntu Server
- Azure Load balancer
- NSG
- Azure Active Directory
- Clustering and Resource Monitoring
- Continuous Data Replication for Failover
- Open SUSE
Software Used
- Server application ( Node JS / DotNET/ Php )
- Corosync, Pacemaker ( Clustering )
- Hawk Console ( Resource Monitoring )
- Hana Database
Solution Highlights
- Using Azure Load balancer, VMs were configured for high availability
- Clustering for both the VMs at OS level using pacemaker and corosync
- Automated Data replication from the primary server to secondary server to ensure data consistency
- Monitoring cluster nodes using Hawk
- Configuring health probes and backend pools for scaling up the application
Implementation Steps
- Firstly, a resource group on Azure was created. Then, a VM was added to that specific resource group to add all the created resources
- Two Opensuse VMs were created in availability set. A load balancer was configured on the backend to Opensuse.
- Opensuse VM packages were updated, and then the required packages were installed for clustering. By configuring both the VMS, clustering was enabled between two the VMs at OS level.
- HAWK Console was used to monitor the created resources.
- HANA database was installed in both VMs and SAP Hana studio was used for clustering and replication was performed from primary to secondary database.
- The resources to be monitored were then configured from Azure and across the OS level.
- After this, topology of master and slave was configured.
- An Active Directory application was created and configured to the created VMs which allowed us to monitor the application from azure.
- After this level of configuring clustering replication,
- Successful failover and failback tests were performed
- The data that was replicated was verified
Benefits
- Biased routing of traffic – effective routing of the traffic during peak load by distributing the load among the 2 servers
- Automated data backup – with the data being backed up automatically, disaster recovery management is in place
- High availability – for seamless back up and failover
- Cluster Monitoring/ Management – view and analyze the logs to assess the performance of the clusters
- Automatic reconfiguration & Dynamically Scalable
- Reliable protection for mission critical data since high availability even during down time
- Robust management across all platforms.