Administer a LogRhythm Disaster Recovery Deployment
This guide describes how to use the LogRhythm Disaster Recovery (DR) solution, which protects businesses from potential site failures due to catastrophic events (power outage, fire, flood, etc.). After the DR solution is configured on Primary and Secondary sites in the network, you can use the DR solution to perform the following tasks:
- Check the replication status
- Change the replication mode (synchronous or asynchronous)
- Perform a failover to the Secondary site and a failback to the Primary site
Prerequisites
This guide assumes that LogRhythm Professional Services already installed and configured the DR solution on a Primary and Secondary site, as described in Install a LogRhythm Disaster Recovery Deployment.
Audience
This guide is for Enterprise customers who administer the DR solution and are responsible for system failovers and failbacks in case of a disaster or a planned outage.
Definition of Disaster Recovery Terms and Concepts
Term | Definition |
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Disaster recovery sites | In the DR solution, you configure two types of sites:
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System status | A Primary or Secondary site can be either:
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Site types | Disaster recovery sites can be characterized as follows:
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Recovery Objectives | Disaster recovery solutions are typically characterized by two recovery objectives:
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Transmission methods | In the DR solution, you can select one of the following transmission methods for the replicated data:
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Failover solutions | A “failover” is the process of enabling another site when the Primary site fails, in two different situations:
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Operation Requirements
After the DR solution is configured, make sure that:
- Platform Managers must be bound to the same Active Directory Domain.
- The Primary and Secondary site must be able to access a Microsoft DNS server within the Active Directory Domain.
- The Primary and Secondary site should be resolvable via DNS — must have a Forward (A-record) and Reverse (PTR) record.
- The DNS server must be configured to allow Secure or Insecure updates from clients.
- The DR Setup utility must be run by an Active Directory user with local administrative rights.
- To create a Failover Cluster, an additional IP address is required on each node participating in the cluster. This IP is used for cluster creation, Failover Clustering node communication, and for providing an IP address to use for providing LogRhythm services. Failover IP addresses should be unused IP addresses on the network. In a multi-subnet scenario, two distinct, unused IP addresses are needed in DR Setup, one in each respective subnet. In a single-subnet DR scenario, only one unused IP address is needed for the Failover IP — it will be the same for Primary and Secondary. The Failover IP should be presented on the network adapter that has access to Active Directory in order to update the accompanying Cluster DNS record. This IP address is a virtualized IP address that the underlying Windows Server Failover Cluster will use for facilitating cluster communications.
- LogRhythm versions on the Primary and Secondary site are on same. If you upgrade the components on the Primary site, you must upgrade them on the Secondary site.
- If the Enable Password Policy option is disabled on the LogRhythm SIEM user account or the SA and LRMirror_Login, passwords will not synchronize between nodes. If Enable Password Policy is enforced, the passwords must be changed manually on the Secondary Node whenever they are changed on the primary. The Enable Password Policy option can be disabled by modifying the user account login on the People tab in the Client Console.
- The service for SQL Server on the Primary site is configured to run under the same account as the SQL Server service on the Secondary site. This must be an Active Directory account with local administrative privileges.
- The SQL Server Agent service on the Primary site is configured to run under the same account as the SQL Agent service on the Secondary site. This should be a named, privileged account that is not the sa account, and must be a domain account.
A common DNS record is configured so that it can point to either the IP address of the Primary Platform Manager or the IP address of the Secondary Platform Manager.
The DNS zone spans the Primary and Secondary sites.
Firewall requirements are listed in the table below. If network firewalls or Group Policy settings prevent this communication, the DR installation will fail. During installation, the DR Setup tool will configure these ports to only allow system-to-system communication.
Application Protocol Ports Cluster Service TCP 3343 Cluster Service UDP 3343 RPC TCP 135 Cluster Administrator UDP 137 Ephemeral Ports UDP 1024-65535 SQL Replication TCP 5022 (default) MS SQL TCP 1433 In some cases, when an admin user creates a non-domain user on the active server, the following error is displayed: User does not have permission to perform this action. The next time login replication occurs, however, the user is created. This error is known to occur in an XM setup in which the DR Mediator is active.