how to make availability of thingworx server in different regions of azure and its impacts?

[KSM]

Hello All,

Good day!

we are implement in the Disaster recovery on Azure, I just want to know if we make available of thingworx server from one region to another region.

1. Is there any impact on my custom applications?
2. If we deploy new features in thingworx application in region1 then will it refelect same in region2?

Just make me clear how this works of availability of thingworx server in different regions when any disaster is happened.

Thanks 

KSM

[VladimirRosu]

Hi @KSM ,

How exactly are you planning to implement DR in Azure?

The answer to the question you asked depends on the detailed answers to those questions, meaning without those details we can't efficiently provide an advice.

There's no built-in automatic synchronization of features for such purposes - you'd need to deploy effectively in two targets, or provide regular backups (that have been tested to work).

There's one note I want to add since we speak about this topic: Disaster Recover (DR) is something different to High Availability (HA). When you're implementing a DR plan, that implies that the operations will be disrupted for a time larger than in the case of HA.

DR also implies that IT infrastructure elements will be deployed in other regions.

In the case of HA, the infra elements must be deployed as close as possible, ideally in the same data-center, due to traffic and latency requirements inherent to HA. The time of disruption for operations in HA is also significantly lower than in case of DR (should be in the range of seconds mostly).

[KSM]

Hi Vladimir,
Thanks for your reply.

we are planning DR like this,

1. we have installed thingworx on azure VMs in one region1.
2. Now, we want make up and running the thingworx server in region2 when any disaster happened.
3. for that we are taking the snapshot of thingworx server as backup from region1 and with some azure mechanism those snapshot will deploy into region2.
4. Now my question is Thingworx server VM's IP address will change from region1 to region2. In one of my thingworx application I have configure the VMs IP address at some place. In that case even though the thingworx server is up and running in region2 but the application won't run due to change of VMs ip address.

• Is there any mechanism to update the IP address automatically  in application in region2 or do we need to configure manually?
• I also want understand any solution or mechanism or way to implement of making up and running thingworx applications  in different regions when we deploy our thignworx applications on cloud.

Thanks
KSM

[VladimirRosu]

Hi @KSM ,

I see this setup is quite ahead already - kudos for doing it (and keep in mind you need to test it to make sure it really works).

Ref the issue at 4: I would setup a load balancer ahead of those two instances, and use the IP of the load balancer only for your application. In this way you will never need to update the IP in your app. The load balancer (or whatever service you choose) will need to detect which ThingWorx VM is online, and be configured to choose the Region 1 for all the situations, except when Region1 is not available.

While you can build extensions to detect the machine IP where the TW server resides, I think that you should probably not work this out at the level of the ThingWorx application itself.

Regarding other mechanisms I'm personally not aware, and it's typically whatever suits the requirements.

We do have PTC consultants on our side that can invest time in this topic, which is too large to answer in a forum format. Please reach out to your PTC Sales Manager or your Customer Success Manager and they can make the necessary link with our ecosystem for this to happen.