Configuration Life-cycle Management

Backup and Restore of VDB configurations

The easiest way to manually backup and restore vdb configurations is to use the menu icon in the upper right of the VDB menu, and use export. This will save a single json file that aggregates the vdb, data source and rules configurations for a given VDB. The same menu can be used to import a VDB (refresh the screen after an import). If there is an existing vdb of the same name on import, the new entry will be named with _1, _2, etc. If the nested configurations (source and rules) exist with the same name on import, they will be reused as part of the imported configuration.

File Based Management

For those wishing to automate backup and restore, the files of the management server configuration can be accessed directly. The configuration files exist in the /opt/heimdall/config directory (accessible only by root) by default. There are several techniques for managing these:

  • Use EFS or another mounted filesystem to keep the config directory accessible in a shared location;
  • Use chef or puppet to provide the configuration files;
  • and; Use the api/config/reload api call to update the configuration in-memory when any change is made.

S3 Bucket Based Load

On the initial startup of a management server, the configuration can be loaded via an S3 bucket using the user data variable "configSource". This is documented in the AWS Cloudformation template.

Recovery

In the event that a proxy has failed in a standalone configuration, it should be sufficient to simply restart the proxy as per the initial deployment. As the proxy will pull the current driver version from the central manager, this will ensure that the proxy matches the central manager version, even if deployed from an older IAM.

In the event of a central manager failure, it typically can be simply restarted. If this fails, it too can be redeployed from the baseline IAM, using the S3 bucket based loadn or shared filesystem to initialize the instance with the proper configuration. If there are any questions on how to do this in your environment, please contact Heimdall support.