Sitecore DR Strategy

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to explain the DR strategy and Server setup for Sitecore Production Environment.

Note: Software version may vary according to your systems.

To setup the DR we need below things in place.

1. For DR we need following Servers.
   • DR CD Server.
   • DR CM Server.
   • DR CD SQL Server.
   • DR CM SQL Server.
   • Proposed DR server for Solr and Analytics.
     • DR ANALYTICS MONGODB server.
     • DR PROD Solr Slave1 server.
     • DR PROD Solr Slave2 server.
     • DR PROD Solr Master server.

2. Server Configurations are as below.

• Configurations for DR CD Server and DR CM Server are as below.

1. • • Microsoft Windows Server OS any up to date version.
     • 16 GB of RAM.
     • 250 GB of Disk Space.
     • IIS 8 or IIS8+.
     • DR CD Server will be clone of PROD CD server.
     • DR CM Server will be clone of PROD CM server.

• Configurations for DR CD SQL Server and DR CM SQL Server are as below.
  • Microsoft Windows Server OS any up to date version.
  • 24 GB of RAM.
  • 1 TB of Disk Space.
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2017 with Microsoft Management Studio 17.3 version.(Any Version can do)
  • IIS 8 or IIS8+.
  • DR CD SQL server will be clone of PROD CD SQL.
  • DR CM SQL server will be clone of PROD CM SQL.

• Configurations for DR Solr Master Server are as below.
  • Microsoft Windows Server OS any up to date version.
  • 8 GB of RAM.
  • 250 GB of Disk Space.
  • IIS 8 or IIS8+.
  • It will be clone of PROD Solr Master.

• Configurations for DR Solr Slave 1 and DR Solr Slave 2 Servers are as below.
  • Microsoft Windows Server OS any up to date version.
  • 8 GB of RAM.
  • 250 GB of Disk Space.
  • IIS 8 or IIS8+.
  • It will be clone of PROD Slaves Solr.

• Configurations for DR ANALYTICS MONGO Server are as below.
  • Microsoft Windows Server OS any up to date version.
  • 8 GB of RAM.
  • 250 GB of Disk Space.
  • IIS 8 or IIS8+.
  • It will be clone of PROD Mongo Server.

3. Process to Sync the DR Servers.

• Sync up Process for SQL Servers. (DR CD SQL server and DR CM SQL server)
  • We will have the Log shipping of Database mirroring mechanism in Place.
  • This above method will perform database sync up from PROD CD SQL server to DR CD SQL server and from PROD CM SQL server to DR CM SQL server.
  • This sync up activity will be performed after scheduled intervals.
  • Log will be generated for analysis purpose of sync up process to check the failures.

• Sync up Process for Applications Servers. (DR CD server and DR CM server)
  • Deployment tool will take care of version control.
  • It will be responsible for deployment of tested UAT code to all the PROD servers.
  • It will also deploy the code to DR CD server and DR CM server once the deployment is done on PROD CD servers and PROD CM server.
  • This deployment will be done on scheduled intervals.

• Sync up of MongoDB servers. (PROD ANALYTICS MONGO)
  • For copying the data from PROD ANALYTICS MONGO server to DR ANALYTICS MONGO server we need create the batch process.
  • This batch process will run on scheduled interval.
  • This batch process will have a MongoDB script which will have logic to transfer all the collection to DR ANALYTICS MONGO server from PROD ANALYTICS MONGO server.

• Sync up of Solr servers.
  • This will be a same kind of batch process scheduler as MongoDB Servers.
  • But this process will have the script which will stop the Solr Instance on all Solr DR Servers and then it will sync the index from PROD Solr server.

4. DR Switch-Over or Failover Plan.
   • We will have the regional distance in Actual Datacenter and DR Datacenter.
   • If any Disaster happens in that case we need to configure the router to route the traffic to DR zone.
   • For this we need to add routing entries in router.
   • And for DR zone we need to have the latest up-to-date environment.
   • DNS configurations need to be set for DR.
   • Above all process needs to be automated by any routing algorithm with any Software like BigIP which needs one Manual invocation by Network DNS changes and Traffic routing changes on Router of Datacenters.

Note: If your PROD environment Datacenter is on One Geo-location then DR Datacenter Geo-location will some other region which depends on data storing policy.

You can actually check and validate and comment out it, if something is missing and which I can update.