Primary to Secondary (failover) External Storage switching for Session Recording.

Products

• CA Privileged Access Manager (PAM)

Issue/Introduction

How is PAM performing the switch from the Primary External Storage to the Secondary (failover) External Storage for session recording?
Should the PAM Administrator make any manual action or is it automatic?

Environment

Product: Layer 7 Privileged Access Manager
Version: 3.x

Resolution

• It is recommendable using different physical resources for the Primary and Secondary storage system, to make sure that, in case of failure in the Primary storage, the Secondary will available.
• The expected configuration by PAM is having both resources mounted and available permanently, to be able perform the switch to the Secondary one whenever a failure in the Primary be detected.
• PAM manages by itself the Session recording failover, which dynamically switches over to the Secondary share without any loss of data.
• While the Secondary share is in use, you cannot view session recordings on the Secondary or the Primary share until the Primary is restored. To restore session recording on the Primary share, the Primary share must be back online. When the Primary share comes back online, recordings that were split across the two shares are automatically recombined. You can then view the recordings seamlessly.

Additional Information

Warning:

• The information of the recorded sessions is stored in the database, and this is the one queried to show the Session Recordings list in the PAM user interface.
• So, there is a record in the database for each recording set in the disk.
• This means that you should not manually delete any file from the external storage resource because it still will be shown in the list. If anyone click on this list row, PAM will not find the recording files and it will fail.
• So, use the purge facility to delete the recording session information as it will keep the consistency between the database and the associated external files.

See also: Set Up Session Recording
                Can I backup and remove PAM session recordings from the external storage device and restore them afterwards if needed?