Geo-diverse high availability deployment

If you want to introduce geo-diversity to your Resilio Active Everywhere deployment, you can deploy Management Consoles in different locations in an active-passive arrangement, and manually switch to the secondary instance in case of a failure. The downtime won't affect the ongoing Job Runs as the Agents connect to each other to form a multipoint-to-multipoint network, and no job-specific data transfers are routed through the Management Console.

Important

Make sure to provision all Agents in your deployment using a configuration file. When you generate the configuration file, use a DNS hostname as the Management Console address.
In this deployment type, events and statistical information will not transfer between the two Management Console nodes.

To introduce geo-diversity to your Resilio Active Everywhere deployment:

Deploy Management Consoles in two locations. For details on installing Management Console, see Install Management Console.
In the Management Consoles Advanced parameters, define the Management Console address as a hostname so that when you switch between the two instances, all services will continue to work.
In the Management Console's configuration file, change the schedule parameter value to adjust the time interval between backups creation. Try to match the frequency of configuration changes. Apply this change to both instances, but offset the time 10 minutes on the secondary instance, to avoid folder name conflicts.
schedule parameter syntax

The schedule parameter syntax is similar to crontab's syntax, with the only difference being that the values are second, minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week. For more information, see Management Console backup & restore.

Example: Primary instance - automatically back up settings every hour
```
"backup": {
    "schedule": "0 0 * * * *",
    "cleanup": "0 0 6 * * *",
    "ttl": 30
    "path": "data\server_backup"
},
```
Example: Secondary instance - automatically back up settings every hour, with 10 minutes offset
```
"backup": {
    "schedule": "0 10 * * * *",
    "cleanup": "0 0 6 * * *",
        "ttl": 30
    "path": "data\server_backup"
},
```
Install Agents and set up a Synchronization Job to synchronize server_backup folders or set up a common storage location for storing backup files.
Install Agents and set up a Synchronization Job
1. Install Agents on both systems.
  Note
  - On the systems running the Management Console, you must install stand-alone Agents. The ones included with the Management Console cannot connect to a remote Management Console.
  - For improved redundancy, add a third Agent instance in a different location, or set up a Cloud Storage endpoint to store a copy of your backups in the cloud.
2. Set up a Synchronization job to automatically synchronize contents of the server_backup between Management Console instances.
  Tip: Backup folder location
  
  Default backup folder location:
  - Windows: C:\ProgramData\Resilio\Connect Server\data\server_backup
  - Linux: {resilio-connect-server}/var/data/server_backup/
Set up a common storage location for storing backup files
1. Set up a storage location that's accessible to both Management Console instances. For example, an Azure Files file share.
2. Mount the resource, ensuring it's available in the Local System user session. For details, see Mapping network share under Local System at the startup.
3. In the Management Console's configuration file, in the backup section, change the path parameter to point to the mounted common file share.
```
"backup": {
    "schedule": "0 0 * * * *",
    "cleanup": "0 0 6 * * *",
    "ttl": 30,
    "path": "Z:\\server_backup"
},
```
Shutdown the Management Console service on the secondary instance.
In case of a failure, restore the configuration on the secondary Management Console instance:
1. Perform system configuration restore from the latest backup, using the srvctrl command line tool.
```
./srvctrl restore backup_1763473962652
```
  For details, see Management Console backup & restore - Restore from a backup.
2. Start the Management Console service.
```
./srvctrl start
```
Change your DNS settings to associate the hostname with the secondary Management Console instance.

Switch back to the primary Management Console instance

Once your primary Management Console instance has recovered from a failure, you can make it active again. To do that:

Make sure the primary instance Agent is up and running and has synchronized the latest backup folder.
Shutdown the currently active secondary Management Console node, to make sure the Agents disconnect from it.
Perform system configuration restore from the latest backup, using the srvctrl command line tool.
```
./srvctrl restore backup_1763473962652
```
For details, see Management Console backup & restore - Restore from a backup.
Start the primary Management Console service instance.
```
./srvctrl start
```
Change your DNS settings to associate the hostname with the primary Management Console instance.

Note

Agents may cache DNS records thus it can take a while for them to register the change and connect to the other Management Console instance.