Cloning SAS Viya - full deployment

[JuanS_OCS]

Dear all,

I hereby come with a couple of questions on SAS Viya:

• has anyone already attempted cloning a SAS Viya server, with full deployment (programming and visual interfaces)?
• Is it possible to do it, on a clean way?
• What exact actions would you recommend to take to and on which order?
• Do you have a better alternative, rather than doing a full new install and migrating/promoting everything? You know the time than promotion takes.

Thank you in advance,

Best regards,

Juan

[alexal · Accepted solution]

@JuanS_OCS ,

Cloning isn't supported. You need to backup and restore as described here.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @alexal ,

thank you for your answer, helpful as always. Please bear with me, let me challenge you a bit:

I understand cloning is not supported. However, it should be technically feasible, at least for SMP deployments (single server installations). The reason why I think this is because, I am often being told by certain teams, that, for a single server change (let's forget cloning for now, for the shake of this example):

• if the IP/network changes, it is usually enough to re-run the ansible playbook of the installation, and changing vars.yml file.
• same for the hostname or alias, if it changes, to recongigure viya, it is enough to re-run the ansible playbook, changing the 
• of course, this probably means to renew the TLS certificate in most cases, again, the ansible playbook could update it.

And, in any of those cases, it would be needed to promote content, because it just stays.

Hence, I would like to share with you a couple of questions:

• Are those statements wrong? I would like to know, to address them properly.
• Are they right? If so, and those actions are supported...then what is the difference of changing a IP/network, hostname/alias and certificate, with a clone, from your point of view?

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,

Juan

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @alexal ,

did you have any chance to give a look into the last questions?

Thank you in advance,

Kind regards,

Juan

[alexal]

@JuanS_OCS ,

I apologize, I had a tab open in my browser but never had a chance to review your response. Thanks for the reminder. As you said already, one of the biggest problems here is changing IP address/hostname, we do not support that yet. So you have to redeploy and promote content.

[SimonDawson]

If the copy is in another LAN segment that can't talk to the original host a clone of a machine should boot up and work no issues if the clone is an exact copy. You have to be very careful with this type of thing because you don't want your clone talking to the original machine by mistake.

There is likely some trickery that can be done with virtual network interfaces that would allow you to deploy onto an internal set of IP addresses that are local only to the host itself and only expose the web server to your LAN. This isn't something that's documented anywhere so this isn't something SAS Technical Support can help you with. This is not something I've ever tried either just a thought I had.

[JuanS_OCS]

Thank you very much, @alexal for your information and updates, and to you @SimonDawson for your general thoughts.

For now, the last thing I would like to know in this regard is:

Is there any current development to support clonning procedures in SAS VIya, in the future? And if the answer is yes, any expectation on when or how would it be?

Thank you in advance! After this, I can consider this thread closed.

Best regards,

Juan

[alexal]

@JuanS_OCS ,

Yes, there are some activities on that matter. I can't speak when that will be released, but I hope in the future releases.

[JuanS_OCS]

Good to know, thanks again @alexal . Looking forward for all of that. 

[alexal]

@JuanS_OCS ,

You are welcome.