Disaster Recovery Plan for RackSpace Cloud Servers

Irrespective of whether you use the Cloud or dedicated servers, it is essential that you should have a proper plan of countering any event if something goes wrong. To put it as simply as possible, technology breaks sometimes.

Therefore, it is important to understand how your business would respond when an undesired event occurs and that you have a well-developed Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place. In the case of a technological glitch, here are some immediate efforts that can be made for recovery.

A formal risk assessment can be conducted to determine the requirements for the disaster recovery plan.
The disaster recovery plan will be periodically tested in a production environment to ensure that it can be implemented in emergency situations and that the management and staff understands how it is to be executed.

Prerequisites for Disaster Recovery Plan

Some pre-requisites required to materialize an effective disaster recovery plan comprise of:

Daily Backup: Daily Backup folder/drive taken to the shared drive.
Weekly Backup: Server Image backup taken on weekly basis.
Nagios Monitoring System: We use Nagios for monitoring the server. Nagios monitors your entire IT infrastructure to ensure systems, applications, services, and business processes are functioning properly.

In the event of a failure, Nagios can alert technical staff about the problem. This allows them to begin remediation processes before outages can affect business processes, end-users, or customers.

We monitor all the hardware resources as well as some custom services as per need.

When the Server is Down

When the services of a particular server are down, it gives all the information like status information, duration, last check etc.

It also provides alert notification of the problem on Admin email with the description of the issue.

Scenario 1: Total Loss of Data

Master Backups for the system data are stored on a shared drive. In the case of data corruption, data loss or missing data, copy fresh data from shared drive and replace with the existing one. After making these changes perform some testing to make sure everything is working fine.

Scenario 2: Total Loss of Cloud Server

Master Backups for the system data are stored on a shared drive. A new system can be created on RackSpace, the latest database from this directory then imported through the web GUI Backup tools. Then DNS can be reconfigured to point to this new IP so that their weblink will function.

All servers master backup is available under shared drive in abc.com server.

Step 1

Create a new server from RackSpace console with the same server space.

Step 2

Select the server Region, give a server name and select the Operating System platform and version.

It will take approximately 10 minutes to build the new server.

Server Status Active means the server is ready, up and running.

Step 3

Open the command prompt and mount the shared drive where server backup are stored using the following command.

Shared drive will be visible in network location portion.

Copy the master data from shared drive to appropriate location in the -newly created server.

Step 4

Edit a record and update the IP address to setup the DNS pointing for new server. Replace the IP address and press Save.

DNS changes will take approximately 5-10 minutes to completely populate the records.

Scenario 3: Complete Region Down

Backup image of servers is taken on a weekly basis. In case of complete region down, server can be created from the available updated snapshot in any other cloud region. Then DNS can be reconfigured to point to this new IP.

Schedule image is taken on weekly basis on Sunday to keep servers image up-to-date.