Administration
Step 3 - Availability Planning for the Supporting Infrastructure
Details such as how to configure the VMs and network that support a grid are beyond the scope of this document. However there are some general things that should be considered in your planning to help ensure the availability of your grid and the services that it supports.
- Use network monitoring software to send alerts to the appropriate support people when a service becomes unavailable. The sooner the right people know that a service is down, the sooner they will be able to fix it. The caGrid Knowledge Center does not endorse any particular network monitoring software.
- You should have plans for the effective backup and restore of the databases used by the grid services. These services keep their most frequently changing data in their database. Daily backup for these databases is recommended.
We recommend that GME and security-related services are configured with a dedicated database that runs on the same host VM as the service. Core caGrid services that have their own MySQL database include:- Dorian
- GTS
- CDS
- GME
- You should have plans for the effective backup and restore of the file systems used by the grid services. The core services do not keep frequently changing data as files, so weekly or monthly backups may be appropriate.
- You should have plans for creating and managing snapshots of VMs. These may be needed to restore the configuration of a VM if the VM becomes corrupted. Since the configuration of VMs does not change often, new snapshots are not needed often.
- You will need a way to manage passwords. As you configure the caGrid core services, you will create a variety of passwords. The CaGrid Knowledge Center uses an open source password vault program called KeePass
for this purpose.
