Deployment SAS Viya 4 DR env on Red Hat OpenShift 4.14 Using Red Hat ACM

[Ahmed_Dhaoui]

Hello everyone,

I’m in the process of designing a disaster recovery plan for SAS Viya on Red Hat OpenShift. The recommended approach from SAS is to back up the environment on the main site and restore it to the disaster recovery (DR) environment.

I was wondering if anyone has tried using Red Hat ACM (Advanced Cluster Management) for workload replication in the DR environment in case of a disaster. I would appreciate hearing about your experiences, as I haven’t found any information on this approach.

Thank you in advance for your contributions.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi @Ahmed_Dhaoui ,

I have not worked with it yet directly, but I can say that, in theory, it should work for as long as you keep attention to some details.

For as long as you implement High Availability, it should work fine: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/high-availability-and-observability-using-red-hat-advanced-cluster-...

The idea is similar to Kubernetes Kosmos released by Scaleway or other solutions: https://www.scaleway.com/en/kubernetes-kosmos/

In short, you will have a split design of 1 K8s cluster for control, administration and load balancing of your different clusters, and then you have your separate clusters and namespaces. So in this sense, that technology will take care of all for you.

I mentioned there are some details to keep in mind, and it all falls down to the backups, state of storage/memory and what is synchronized between the different kinds and locations of storage on the clusters. The images/containers/namespaces should be replicated just fine. But the Persistent Volumes (local & Shared Storages) will need to ensure:

1- all memory data to be frequently backup (SAS Backup)

2- run periodically data integrity checks to ensure no broken or locked files and all files been properly synchronized across all storages

Little disclaimer here: Please do keep in mind that for as long as it has not been tested by SAS Institute and not documented, it will be not officially supported as such.

[Ahmed_Dhaoui]

Thank you for your response.
Indeed, this approach is not supported by SAS.

I will investigate this approach further and update this thread if we attempt DR using ACM in OpenShift.