Does CA Harvest support HA and DR?

Products

• CA Harvest Software Change Manager - OpenMake Meister
• CA Harvest Software Change Manager

Issue/Introduction

Does CA Harvest support High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR)?

Environment

Harvest Software Change Manager all versions

Resolution

Harvest can support a fail over scenario but the switching of servers is outside of Harvest control. In order to be transparent to the Harvest users, the fail over server must use the RT_FORCE_NODE_NAME=alias environment variable where the alias is the name of the main Harvest broker machine and not the name of the fail over server host name.

So when a disaster occurs, then external controls must start the fail over server so that Harvest activity can resume, or if the fail over server must be running at the same time as the main Harvest server then the DNS administrator must have the fail over server offline to prevent host name contention on the network.

If there are any active harvest transactions occurring and suddenly the main harvest server is brought down then those activities will not be committed to the database and will have to rerun.