Having several server nodes but only using 1 at a time

Legacy Operations
1

Currently I believe server nodes are considered in use if they are active. In our environment we have a DR process using two octopus deploy nodes in an active / passive (passive meaning completly off). What we would like to do going forward is have these nodes be unique within octopus deploy but simply not running for non active instances. Is there anyway to currently do this or will adding another node disable all deploys because of a licensing concern. In addition are there any plans to enable this in the future?

4

Hi Brent,

Thanks for getting in touch!

Unfortunately adding a cold spare in as a second node would indeed trigger a requirement for a High Availability (now Data Centre) license. I don’t see this requirement changing in the future, so I don’t have good news for you on that front.

Are you able to expand on why you specifically need a seperate node ID?

If you configure your cold spare instance with the same node ID as your primary (active) server and point it at the same database everything should “just work”, the exception being that polling Tentacles will need to be configured to poll both IP’s/Server names. Configuring the server node ID to match your active server is a simple command Octopus.Server.exe configure --serverNodeName=VALUE (Value will need to be replaced with the node name, which can be located in you OctopusServer.config file).

You will also need to make sure that the required folders on disk are kept in sync between the two instances.

I hope this helps, please let me know if there is anything else that I can help you with,

Regards,
Alex

5

Alex,

We actually do that currently and it has been pretty successful, allowing us to failover between datacenters easily (We have quarterly DR exercises). After this last one I noticed the following:
image

Where the current leader was looking like it wasn’t checking in. Looking into it further, It looks like its a simple UI issue and everything is working fine (I took this picture at 10:03am). I was more concerned it might be because we were using this in an unsupported pattern. Not sure if this is something that has been fixed but we are on a relatively older version 3.12.8.

I also thought it would be nice to have two separate machines so people could look in the GUI to figure out where it was running but its not worth the extra cost of Datacenter :slight_smile:

Thanks!

Brent