With the release of Era version 2.2 in late June 2021, which i wrote a blog post about here, the Era Management Plane was improved when it comes to providing high availability (HA).
Era Management Plane consists of two service groups:
- Front-end services (API, agent, web service).
- Back-end service (database or repository).
Prior to Era 2.2. there was an option to deploy the Era Management Plane in HA mode for the back-end services meaning the PostgreSQL database providing the Era repository was deployed in a leader, follower (sync) & follower (async) manner.
With Era 2.2 there is now an options to deploy both the front-end and back-end services in a highly available manner according to the below logically figure where the Era mgmt boxes includes both the front-end & back-end services.
The number of virtual machines required for an Era Management Plane HA configuration are listed in the below table.
| HA configuration, single Nutanix cluster |
At least nine: — Three VMs providing the front-end services (API, agent, web). — Two VMs providing an HA proxy service. Used by the front-end services to communicate with the back-end service. — Three VMs providing the back-end service (Postgres DB cluster). — One VM runs the Era management agent. |
| HA configuration, multiple Nutanix clusters |
At least ten: — Three VMs providing the front-end services (API, agent, web). — Two VMs providing an HA proxy service. Used by the front-end services to communicate with the back-end service. — Three VMs providing the back-end service (Postgres DB cluster). — One VM in each Nutanix cluster that runs the Era management agent. |
As described in the figure above the logical component Era HA Proxy, which consists of two VMs, needs to be deployed in the same Nutanix cluster. This is planned to be relaxed in the near future meaning there will be no single-point of-failure (SPOF) for the Era Management Plane.
If you need more information you can read more about the Era Management Plane availability & configuration options in an official Nutanix document i put together. You can find the document here.
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