Challenge

Many organizations have infrastructure that spans multiple datacenters. Vault provides the critical services of identity management, secrets storage, and policy management. It is inevitable for organizations to require a disaster recovery (DR) strategy to protect their Vault deployment against catastrophic failure of an entire cluster.

Solution

In Vault Enterprise, disaster recovery (or DR) replication operates on a leader/follower model, wherein a leader cluster (known as a primary) is linked to a series of follower secondary clusters. The primary cluster acts as the system of record and asynchronously replicates most Vault data. Secondaries share the same underlying configuration, policy, and supporting secrets (K/V values, encryption keys for transit, etc) infrastructure as the primary. They also share the same token and lease infrastructure as the primary, as they are designed to allow for continuous operations with applications connecting to the original primary on the election of the DR secondary. DR is designed to be a mechanism to protect against catastrophic failure of entire clusters.

Demo

Learn how to set up Disaster Recovery replication in Vault Enterprise, and failover when disaster strikes to ensure continuity of service.