Author Topic: Redundant Zentyal servers  (Read 4099 times)

ctucc99

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Redundant Zentyal servers
« on: December 09, 2015, 06:07:43 pm »
Sorry if this topic has been posted and beat to death (I could not locate exactly what I was looking for, so I posted it as a new topic).

Small company (<30 desktops) and installed Zentyal as a replacement for aging MS AD server.  So far no complaints - Zentyal is doing the job fine and I am about 80% done migrating my users to it.

Question I have is:  I know I can back up all my server configurations through the backup utility on the Dashboard - but is there a way I can build a secondary Zentyal server for redundancy in case the first server fails?   I guess in the same vein as MS PDC/BDC.   My fear is that my main Zentyal server goes down and that the only option I have is to restore it's configuration backup to another server (which will most certainly cause downtime for my users).

I would rather have 2 servers running together actively backing each other's configurations up with the secondary server taking over (for user authentication, DNS, VPN, etc.) automatically should the primary server fail.

Can anyone offer any resources/links or suggestions for setting this up?

vmb

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Re: Redundant Zentyal servers
« Reply #1 on: December 13, 2015, 05:02:17 pm »
This is a lot more complicated to do properly than you think and probably beyond the roadmap of Zentyal.
Here is my short answer...

Replicate your AD across multiple hosts, either:
- Re-use the outgoing MS AD Server as a 'BDC'
- Install another Samba AD DC into your Domain
- Install another Zentyal server into your Domain

Make your basic IP services resilient
- More than one DNS host
- A fallback DHCP host
- Multiple NTP sources

Mirror your servers...
At this point you have probably outgrown Zentyal and are looking at a private OpenStack cloud.

vmb

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Re: Redundant Zentyal servers
« Reply #2 on: December 13, 2015, 08:26:23 pm »
After my last post I recalled seeing an article about just what you need. http://labs.zentyal.org/high-availability-in-zentyal/ I don't know if it is still in the paid for version but it's not in 4.2 Development Edition.

ctucc99

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Re: Redundant Zentyal servers
« Reply #3 on: December 16, 2015, 04:19:50 pm »
Thank you for the info!