Automated recovery for Microsoft IIS Applications running on Amazon EC2

September 14, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Automated Recovery For Microsoft IIS Applications Running on Amazon EC2

A Better Choice For Reducing IIS Downtime

Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services) is the fourth most popular web server in use today, with a 7.8% market share behind Apache, Nginx, and Cloudflare (source W3Techs.com, 8/12/20). And many IIS customers are running their IIS applications on Amazon EC2.

IIS is a versatile, extensible, and highly configurable web server. IIS includes some important functionality to ensure that applications are running properly, such as Application Pools and remote management capabilities to allow administrators to manage IIS remotely using PowerShell.

Deciding How To Monitor And Manage IIS Applications

When it comes to managing and monitoring IIS applications, customers have a number of options. They are either focused on improving the performance of applications running on IIS, or monitoring and addressing any failures.

Microsoft does include some native functionality to help you optimize and manage your applications running on IIS. If you and your team are very technical, then you may be comfortable using PowerShell or another scripting language to manage IIS Application Pools. Doing this allows you to automatically recycle your pools and virtual memory when certain time or request thresholds are met.

But this does not help you if your IIS applications experience a failure. To monitor your IIS servers, you need to look to monitoring (“APM”) tools that can alert you to any failures and provide you with details about what failed. These include commercial solutions such as from SolarWinds, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Datadog, and New Relic. How you decide between them depends on your requirements, the scope and sophistication of their features, and the user interface and the simplicity of the set-up process. APM solutions are great at alerting you when something goes wrong and why, but they don’t always help you get back up and running if your IIS servers are down.

A Better Choice For Reducing IIS Downtime

If you are looking for a solution that not only monitors your IIS servers running on Amazon EC2 but also eliminates downtime, then we encourage you to check out SIOS AppKeeper monitoring solutions. AppKeeper continuously monitors and automatically recovers applications, such as those running on IIS, if they experience service interruptions and downtime.

Let’s look at how AppKeeper EC2 monitoring solution helps reduce IIS downtime:

AppKeeper monitors your EC2 services and instances. Once you install and configure AppKeeper (which only takes about 10 minutes) you specify which Amazon EC2 instances and services it should monitor, and what actions should be taken if a systems impairment is experienced.
AppKeeper alerts you if any systems failures are detected with your IIS webservers. You receive an alert by email or SMS and can see the details of the failure events and what actions were taken.

AppKeeper lauches automatic restarting services and rebooting instances if necessary upon the detection of system failures. You no longer have to respond to any alerts and troubleshoot what happened before restarting. AppKeeper does that automatically for you.

By going beyond simply managing IIS server performance or monitoring to automatic remediation, AppKeeper eliminates downtime and provides the peace of mind you deserve.

Today hundreds of companies rely on AppKeeper to keep their cloud environments running. We invite you to check out the video below see how easy it is to install and use AppKeeper.

Video: Installing AppKeeper and recovering from AWS EC2 failures Demo

And if you like what you see, please feel free to sign up for a free 14-day trial of AppKeeper.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

How to Deliver High Availability for SQL Server in Linux Environments

September 10, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How to Deliver High Availability for SQL Server in Linux Environments

How to Deliver High Availability For SQL Server in Linux Environments

If your organization is running business-critical Microsoft SQL Server on Linux, your IT team undoubtedly knows how challenging continually maintaining high availability, performance and security can be. Particularly difficult is how to ensure high availability with robust replication and automatic failover. Using open-source software and an easily configured HA SANless cluster solution can offer a simpler maintenance approach without sacrificing the safety and performance your organization requires.

Limited High Availability Options for Linux

Most Linux distributions give IT departments two inferior choices for high availability: either pay more for the SQL Server Enterprise Edition to implement Always On Availability Groups, or struggle to make complex do-it-yourself HA Linux configurations work well—something that can be extraordinarily difficult to do.

The problem with using the Enterprise Edition is that it undermines the cost-saving strategy for using an open-source operating system on commodity hardware. For a limited number of small SQL Server applications, it might be possible to justify the additional cost. But it’s too expensive for many database applications and will do nothing to provide general-purpose HA for Linux.

Providing HA across all applications running in a Linux environment is possible using open-source software, such as Pacemaker and Corosync, or SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. But getting the full software stack to work as desired requires creating (and testing) custom scripts for each application, and these scripts often need to be retested and updated after even minor changes are made to any of the software or hardware being used. Availability-related capabilities that are unsupported in both SQL Server Standard Edition and Linux can make this effort more challenging.

Finding an Alternative High Availability Solution for SQL Server in Linux

To make HA both cost-effective and easy to implement, you may want to consider two different, general-purpose approaches.

One is using storage-based systems that protect data by replicating it within a redundant and resilient storage area networks (SANs). This approach is agnostic with respect to the host operating system, but it requires that the entire SAN infrastructure be acquired from a single vendor and relies on separate failover provisions to deliver high availability.

The other approach is host-based and involves creating a storage-agnostic SANless cluster across Linux server instances. As an HA overlay, these clusters are capable of operating across both the LAN and WAN in private, public and hybrid clouds. The overlay is also application-agnostic, enabling organizations to have a single, universal HA solution across all applications. While this approach does consume host resources, these are relatively inexpensive and easy to scale in a Linux environment.

Most HA SANless cluster options provide a combination of real-time block-level data replication, continuous application monitoring, and configurable failover/failback recovery policies to protect all business-critical applications, including those using Always On Failover Cluster Instances available in the Standard Edition of SQL Server.

SIOS Technology Corp. offers more robust HA SANless cluster solutions for Linux with advanced capabilities that are designed to free IT from the complexity and daily challenges of supporting and optimizing computing infrastructures. The SIOS Protection Suite solution with LifeKeeper provides:

Continuous monitoring of the entire Linux application stack
Complete Application-Aware Protection with its application recovery kits (ARK) for fast, safe recovery or failover of complex applications and databases
Wizard-driven setup for Linux clustering
Configuration flexibility, such as using a traditional shared-storage cluster or software to synchronize local storage in a SANless cluster configuration

For example, a SANless cluster can handle two concurrent failures. The basic operation is the same in the LAN and WAN, as well as across private, public, and hybrid clouds.

In a typical two-node cluster server #1 is initially the primary that replicates data to servers #. It experiences a problem, automatically triggering a failover to server #2, which now becomes the primary.

In this situation, the IT department would likely begin diagnosing and repairing whatever problem caused server #1 to fail. Once fixed, it could take over as the primary or server #2 could continue in that capacity replicating data to servers #1.

With most HA SANless clustering configurations, failovers are automatic, and both failovers and failbacks can be controlled by a browser-based console.

For further information about SIOS LifeKeeper and Protection Suite solutions, visit SIOS SAN and SANless High Availability Clusters for Cluster Server Environments.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

How to Activate a License for SIOS Clustering Software

September 6, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How to Activate a License for SIOS Clustering Software

This brief video is the first in a series of application availability “how to” tutorials designed by the SIOS support team. It walks through the simple steps needed to get started with your SIOS Protection Suite or SIOS DataKeeper software. Learn how to access a wide range of support resources in the SIOS documentation library.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

What If We Eliminated Apache Downtime?

August 30, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

**Eliminate* Apache web server downtime with SIOS AppKeeper Monitoring**

Today Apache webservers are the most popular webservers on the Internet. Companies are deploying mission-critical, customer-facing applications built on Apache using cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. So you can bet that they are investing a lot of time and money in monitoring those applications and trying to reduce downtime. But what if we told you we could eliminate the need for manual intervention via automated monitoring and restarting applications when your Apache web servers are down?

Before we go into how we can do that, let’s step back for a minute and look at choices that companies have when it comes to monitoring and managing their Apache web servers and those critical applications.

How to monitor and protect your Apache web servers from unnecessary downtime

Anyone deploying applications using Apache webservers is either considering monitoring the health of their webservers themselves or outsourcing that task to a third party.

When it comes to monitoring cloud applications running on Amazon Web Services, a popular choice is to use Amazon CloudWatch. Some companies are even extending the functionality of CloudWatch by creating some levels of automation by developing scripts or by using AWS Lambda. But configuring Amazon CloudWatch properly with custom metrics and setting up AWS Lambda requires a certain amount of technical expertise that may be beyond that of many companies. And then there is a cost and effort required to maintain any scripts as the applications evolve.

Another choice is to invest in a comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring (“APM”) solution from a vendor such as New Relics, Dynatrace, DataDog, or LogicMonitor. These can be very appropriate if you want to monitor more than just your AWS environment. APM solutions are very configurable and will provide you with a lot of data in terms of information about what happened.

But have you reduced your downtime? Probably not. What you have done is invested in a system that will alert you immediately if and when your Apache webservers go down, and will overload you with data (or “alert storms”) as you try to get things running again.

Some companies have decided to outsource the responsibility for monitoring and managing their applications to a trusted third party (often a “managed service provider” or MSP). In return for a base monthly fee, the MSP monitors applications and offers a core set of services, often bound by a Service Level Agreement. When alerts are received, they investigate. In some cases, these investigations can require (costly) escalations. If and when applications go down, the MSP will then take control and restart services or reboot instances where they can. But these remediation actions are often an extra expense.

There has to be a better way.

How automated monitoring and restart with SIOS AppKeeper eliminates Apache Webserver downtime

Based on our customer experience, the average company with only three EC2 instances experiences downtime at least once a month. “The site is down! Drop everything. Find out what needs to be done!” What you need to do is reduce the need for these unnecessary fire drills.

SIOS AppKeeper is a SaaS service that is easy to install and configure and monitors any services and applications running on Amazon EC2, such as your Apache httpd service. When an anomaly is detected, AppKeeper automatically restarts the service, and if that doesn’t work it reboots the entire instance. No more reading through logs to pinpoint the reason for the failure, or escalation to developers to restart your service. Or expensive outsourcing fees. AppKeeper provides “set-it-and-forget-it” functionality so that you can eliminate downtime.

Today hundreds of companies rely on AppKeeper to keep their cloud environments running. We invite you to check out the video below for a demonstration of how AppKeeper protects Apache webservers. And if you like what you see, please feel free to sign up for a free 14-day trial of AppKeeper.

*Based on customer data, AppKeeper addresses 85% of application service failures. So in almost nine times out of ten AppKeeper sends out an email notifying customers that downtime was detected and the services were restarted or the instances were rebooted automatically. Isn’t that better than panicking and digging through log files before manually restarting everything?

Tips for Restoring SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Configuration Specifics

August 25, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Tips for Restoring SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Configuration Specifics

Nice job “Random Co-worker”! And by nice job, I didn’t really mean nice job. And by “Random Coworker” I mean the guy who checked the box that shouldn’t be checked, or unchecked the box that should be checked, the man or woman who skipped the message and the warning, and the “Please confirm” safety measures and just wrecked your SIOS Protection Suite for Linux configuration.

We’ve all been there. It was an accident. However it happened, it happened. Suddenly you are scrambling to figure out what to do to recover the configuration, the data, and the “whatever” before the boss finds out.

As the VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology Corp. our teams are actively working with partners and customers to architect and implement enterprise availability to protect their systems from downtime. Accidents happen, and a recent customer experience reminded me that even with our multiple checks and warnings, even the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux product isn’t immune to accidental configuration changes, but there is a simple tip for faster recovery from the “Random Coworker’s” accidental blunder.

How to Recover SIOS Protection Suite for Linux After Accidental Configuration Changes

Native to the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux (SPS-L) is a tool called lkbackup, located under /opt/LifeKeeper/bin/lkbackup. The tool, as the name might suggest, creates a backup of the SPS-L configuration details. Note: This tool does not backup all of the application data, but it does create a backup of all the data for the SPS-L configuration such as: resource definitions, tunables configured in the /etc/default/LifeKeeper file, customer created generic application scripts, flags associated with the state of the cluster, communication path/cluster definitions, and more.

[root@baymax ~ ] # /opt/LifeKeeper/bin/lkbackup -c -f /root/mylkbackup-5.15.2020-v9.4.1 –cluster –ssh

Example: : lkbackup create syntax

This creates a backup file named mylkbackup-5.15.2020-v9.4.1 under the /root folder. The –cluster tells lkbackup to create the same file on each cluster node. The –ssh uses ssh protocol to connect to each cluster node. Additional lkbackup details are here:

Our Customer Experience Services Team recommends taking a backup before making SPS-L configuration changes, such as upgrades, resource removal or addition, or configuration changes.

So when you need to restore the SPS-L configuration, the change is as simple as running lkbackup again.

[root@baymax ~ ] # /opt/LifeKeeper/bin/lkbackup -x -f /root/mylkbackup-5.15.2020-v9.4.1 –cluster –ssh

Example: lkbackup restore syntax

Autobackup Feature Automatically Captures a lkbackup File

But, what do you do if you forgot to run lkbackup to create this file before your “Random Coworker” blundered away hours of SPS-L setup and configuration? What do you do if the “Guy” or “Gal” who set up SPS-L is on vacation, paternity or maternity leave? What if you are the “Random Coworker” and Steve from the Basis Team is heading down the hallway to see how things are going? For most installations, SIOS enables an autobackup feature during the installation. This autobackup feature will automatically capture a lkbackup file for you at 3am local time, under /opt/LifeKeeper/config/auto-backup.#.tgz

[root@baymax ~]# ls -ltr /opt/LifeKeeper/config/auto-backup.*

Example. Output from config/auto-backup listing

If your system has been installed and configured properly, the autobackups have been running each night, ready to cover you when your “Random Coworker” strikes. Find the SPS-L auto-backup.#.tgz before the blunder, and using the SPS-L lkbackup tool, retrieve and restore your SIOS Protection Suite for Linux Configuration to the previously configured state.

[root@baymax ~ ] # lkstop; /opt/LifeKeeper/bin/lkbackup -c -f /opt/LifeKeeper/config/auto-backup.0.tgz

Example: lkbackup restore syntax for auto-backup

Repeat this on the other nodes in the cluster as required.

Note. If your system doesn’t appear to be configured to generate the auto-backup files and protect you from your own “Random Coworker”, SIOS offers installation and configuration services, and configuration health checks performed by a SIOS Professional Services Engineer.

— Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Reproduced with permission from SIOS