High Availability of NAKIVO Backup and Replication

Product version: 9.1

Last modified: 12 September 2019

Question

How can I set high availability for NAKIVO Backup & Replication?

Answer

High availability for the Director component of NAKIVO Backup & Replication can be set by deploying the product on a VM and leveraging VMware’s built-in High Availability feature.

Alternatively, you can move the NAKIVO Backup & Replication database to a shared folder and set a “stand-by” failover instance of the software. You can use this instance if the primary instance is unavailable.

To set up a stand-by instance, follow the steps below:

  1. Install the primary NAKIVO Backup & Replication copy.

  2. Install a secondary NAKIVO Backup & Replication copy.

  3. Create a shared folder that can be accessed from both machines.

  4. Stop NAKIVO Backup & Replication services on both machines.

  5. Copy the "userdata" folder from the production machine to the shared folder.

  6. Delete the "userdata" folder from both the production machine and the failover machine.

  7. Mount the shared folder to both the production machine and the failover machine. Create symbolic links to the “userdata” folder on a share. For example:

    1. Download and unzip PSTools, and locate the PsExec.exe utility.

    2. Run the command prompt as Administrator and use the PsExec.exe utility to run another command-line process from the System account:
      psexec -s C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe

    3. Mount the shared folder as a network drive from the command line (make sure that the account that you use has read and write permissions):
      net use Z: \\fileserver\share /u:domainname\username password

    4. Create a symbolic link to disk Z: <installation path>\NAKIVO Backup & Replication from cmd:
      mklink /d UserData Z:

  8. Start NAKIVO Backup & Replication services on the production machine.

If the production machine fails, you can start NAKIVO Backup & Replication services on the failover machine.