[chef] Chef 12 High Availability and AWS

[Gary < >]

I am trying set up Chef 12 High Availability as delineated in the Chef documents.

I am creating 3 instances in ec2. 

1) Primary Backend 

2) Secondary Backend 

3) Primary Frontend 

On the primary backend I am adding a second IP to eth0. This will be my VIP IP. I configure it to allow it to move to the secondary if it needs to. 

I am creating four route53 records: 

be1.mydomain.com (primary backend) 

be2.mydomain.com (secondary backend) 

be-vip.mydomain.com (backend vip) 

fe1.mydomain.com (primary frontend) 

My chef-server.rb looks like this: 

topology 'ha' 

ha['provider'] = 'aws' 

ha['aws_access_key_id'] = 'xxxxxx' 

ha['aws_secret_access_key'] = 'xxxxxx' 

ha['ebs_volume_id'] = 'vol-8ef6ae8d' 

ha['ebs_device'] = '/dev/xvdg' 

server 'be1.mydomain.com', 

:ipaddress => xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

:role => 'backend', 

:bootstrap => true 

server 'be2.mydomain.com', 

:ipaddress => xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, 

:role => 'backend' 

backend_vip 'be-vip.mydomain.com', 

:ipaddress => xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, 

:device => 'eth0', 

:heartbeat_device => 'eth0' 

server 'fe1.mydomain.com', 

:ipaddress => xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, 

:role => 'frontend'

If I paste the HA stuff into /etc/opscode/chef-server.rb on the primary backend and then run chef-server-ctl reconfigure the process dies with rabbitmq. 

If I leave the HA config out and run chef-server-ctl reconfigure the process completes but obviously I do not have HA. 

I am wondering if I did the backend VIP stuff wrong. I thought about using an EIP but those assume a public IP up front and it doesn't seem to be the correct solution. 

What the heck am I doing wrong???