[chef] Re: Chef Server - How to do High Availability?

["Julian C. Dunn" < >]

On Sep 2, 2012, at 6:40 PM, bradford 
<
 >
 wrote:

> We've decided on Chef and would like to setup a Chef Server at work.
> We would also like to have high availability of this server, for
> obvious reasons:  so that we can still configure if our Chef server
> goes down.  The tutorials seem to be really lacking in this area and
> I'm wondering if I'm missing any or if it's so simple that no one
> bothers.  Does anyone know of any good tutorials (or have any tips)
> for making Chef Server highly available?
> http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Scalability+and+High+Availability
> is pretty skimpy.  Also, does Chef Server support organizations?  Or
> is this something only available with the hosted Chef Sever?

Frankly there's not a turnkey solution for HA using Open Source Chef Server; 
you kind of need to create your own. (Looks like Private Chef uses some 
combination of DRBD filesystem and other magic to achieve HA, but this 
wouldn't work for us in the cloud.)

Right now what we do is just periodically couchdump the CouchDB and store it 
with a tarball, taken at the same time, of /var/chef. I can restore these to 
a warm standby Chef server (has all of Chef installed, just with no data) and 
be back up & running fairly quickly.

I'm hoping that with Chef 11, the data is stored in just one place rather 
than needing to have a couchdump & cookbook cache that's synchronized.

- Julian