Preparing VitalQIP for Disaster Recovery

DHCP and DNS are very critical for any organization, and downtime must be avoided. Management of DNS and DHCP servers can be less critical than the DNS and DHCP servers themselves, but still requires a disaster recovery plan.

Disaster recovery plans should consider DHCP failover, DNS redundancy, and disaster recovery of the VitalQIP Enterprise Server as unrelated, even if all three are on the same system. DHCP fault-tolerance is provided by Cygna Labs failover features or by a split-scope DHCP design. DNS redundancy means having multiple DNS servers configured for network clients. If one DNS server is down, clients use an alternate server that is configured to have all necessary data. For most customers, the VitalQIP database is somewhat less critical than DNS or DHCP. A brief downtime allows data to be loaded to a new Enterprise Server system and changeover procedures to be performed. However, a long outage of the Enterprise Server can have negative consequences on operations, particularly if your organization has

a requirement that Dynamic DHCP hostnames and IP addresses be resolvable in DNS.

This paper discusses Enterprise Server disaster recovery but also mentions DHCP and DNS disaster recovery. We use the term “Disaster Recovery Enterprise Server” to designate a backup Enterprise Server that runs on different hardware with a different license key and a different database. The use of the current version of VitalQIP is assumed, although most of the discussion is applicable to earlier versions of VitalQIP.