Prerequisites

You should check with your IT organization before commencing any high availability deployment to ensure that the network infrastructure can support your intended deployment.

This guide only covers the configuring of the Blue Prism software in a high availability configuration. It does not cover the details of configuring required third-party products.

Before you configure SS&C | Blue Prism® Hub and, optionally, SS&C | Blue Prism® Interact, you will need:

Rabbit MQ Cluster

It is recommended that you use a minimum of three RabbitMQ servers in your RabbitMQ Cluster with mirror queues. The servers must all be running the same versions of RabbitMQ and Erlang. For information on the required versions, see Message Broker server.

Information on creating a cluster can be found on the RabbitMQ website: https://www.rabbitmq.com/clustering.html.

SQL High Availability Group

If is recommended that you use a minimum of two SQL Servers in an Always-On Availability Group. If you are using Azure, an Azure Load Balancer is required.

If Blue Prism Hub and/or Blue Prism Interact are installed in a standard configuration (single web server), the installers create the databases. However, for the high availability configuration, you need to create the required databases manually prior to installing the software, along with additional databases that are used as caches for key services. The required databases are:

  • AuditDB
  • AuthenticationServerDB
  • EmailServiceDB
  • FileServiceDB
  • HubDB
  • LicenseManagerDB
  • NotificationCenterDB
  • AuthenticationServerCache
  • HubCache

If you are also installing Interact, you will need the following additional databases:

  • IadaDB
  • InteractDB
  • InteractCache

For more information on Always-On Availability Groups, see the Microsoft documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/overview-of-always-on-availability-groups-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver15

You should work with your Database Administrators to create the databases and add them to the Always-On Availability Group. They are likely to have a scripted process and your organization may have additional configuration settings that are required.

Load Balancer

You will need a Load Balancer in place to distribute the tasks to the servers in the high availability environment. You should use a Load Balancer best suited for your organization. IP transparency must be set on the load balancer in order to store the appropriate IP address in the audit events.

This guide uses HAProxy as the example Load Balancer in the high availability configuration. For more information on this configuration, see Example infrastructure and HAProxy Load Balancer – Example configuration.

Web servers

You will need to prepare web server hosts to be used in the high availability configuration. You will need a web server for the initial installation and configuration of Hub and/or Interact, and additional web server hosts to duplicate the set up to.

See the Hub Install Guide and the Interact Install Guide for the hardware and software requirements of the servers.

To prepare the hosts:

  • Install IIS on each host. For more information, see Install IIS.
  • Install Microsoft .NET Core Runtime (3.1.11 or later) and Microsoft Windows Desktop Runtime (3.1.11 or later) on each host. Additional hosts must use the same version as on the initial web server. For information on installing, see Install .NET Core Components.

See the Hub Install Guide for more information about downloading the software.

Before installing the software, you must decide whether to use Windows Authentication or SQL Authentication. If you use Windows Authentication, you must ensure your service accounts are configured to access the appropriate application pools and certificates. You must do this after you have installed your initial web server, but before you run any of the HA scripts. For more information, see Installing Hub using Windows Authentication and Installing Interact using Windows Authentication.

Blue Prism software and scripts

You will need to download the following from the Blue Prism Portal:

  • Blue Prism Hub installer
  • Blue Prism Interact installer
  • High Availability Scripts
  • Blue Prism Data Protector