Is the CLI backup file portable to a different host? (SW broker, HA on Kubernetes)

Solace Event Broker
1

We are looking for a way to back up and restore broker configuration
on a Solace software event broker HA deployment on Kubernetes.

The backup file created by the “backup” command inside the container
appears to be binary rather than plain text, so we cannot open or
edit it.

Our requirement is:

  1. The backup must not contain anything tied to the original host
    (hostname, IP address, MAC address, and so on).
  2. It must be possible to restore that file directly on a different
    set of servers (an evacuation environment) and have the broker
    come up immediately.

Questions:

  • Does the backup file contain host-specific values? If so, which
    ones, and is there a way to exclude or override them at restore
    time?
  • Is restoring a backup taken on cluster A onto a completely
    different cluster B a supported use case?
  • If not, what is the recommended approach for this requirement?

Any experience with this would be appreciated.

2

Hello Leesh,
Based on your desire to be able to port configuration from one broker to another and modify configuration such as VPN name, hostname etc I would recommend using Terraform.

The Solace Terraform provider has a capability called configuration generation which allows you to generate hcl based off of your currently deployed broker. This process will serve as the ‘backup’ portion of the process.
After you have the generated terraform configuration you are free to modify it as you see fit, then plan and apply it to a different destination. This would allow you to create many brokers that are near identical.

You can create and configure these extra services and leave them with message ingress turned off while they are your ‘recovery’ broker. In the event you would like to fail over you can move the host name to your ‘recovery’ system and enable traffic to that broker.

However this is automatically handled if you leverage Solace Disaster Recovery. Your primary and recovery brokers will be linked and configuration will be moved in real time to the recovery broker. Messaging will also be replicated to your recovery broker sin you will not only get your configuration right away during a failover you will also have any messages that were on the primary broker at time time of failover.

Hopefully this helps. Please let me know if you have followup questions.

Jamieson