Replace a virtual Conductor with a fresh VM

Sometimes you may need to replace your virtual Conductor with a fresh VM.

This is normally only necessary if the Conductor has been updated through many different versions of our software, or if something happens to the VM that prevents the OS from running correctly.

In the worst case, you would need to restore from a DB backup. You should be doing DB backups and Conductor Support Bundles regularly.

If you need to replace your virtual Conductor, please create a support ticket and provide a DB Backup and/or a Support Bundle, if you have not already. Both are best, but Tempered Customer Success can work with one or the other if needed.

Before you begin

From Tempered Customer Success, you need:

  • An open virtualization appliance (OVA) file
  • A replacement license voucher for your replacement Conductor.
  • Customer Success needs to un-bind your voucher in the license system so that your replacement voucher is valid

How to replace a Conductor

  1. Keep your current Conductor running, if possible.
  2. Create a new Conductor from the OVA file from Tempered Customer Success, and provision it with the new license voucher.
  3. Complete the basic configuration steps, but do not configure it to match the IP of the current Conductor yet.
  4. Once you get to the Conductor dashboard, go to Settings (Gear Icon) > Diagnostics > Restore database backup, and upload the most recent backup you have.
  5. The Conductor will reboot, and come back online with all of your old settings.
  6. Shut down your old Conductor, and re-IP the new Conductor to take its place.
  7. Ensure that devices are coming back online.
  8. Reach out to Customer Success and let us know that you have completed the replacement process. They will let you know when to re-sync your Conductor.
  9. Re-sync your Conductor by going to Settings > Licensing > Sync all.

Replace a High-Availability (HA) Conductor

If you have two Conductors running as an HA pair, you can follow the same instructions above for your active only, and when everything is complete, you can spin up a new standby and HA-pair it with the active to replicate to it. There is no need to restore the standby from a DB backup.

Make sure to tell Customer Success if your Conductor is in HA so they can provide you with two replacement Conductor license vouchers.

Replace a physical Conductor

You can follow the steps above with a hardware 400 or 500 Conductor to migrate between physical Conductors, or to migrate from a hardware Conductor to a virtual/cloud Conductor.

Please reach out to Customer Success with information about your environment before doing this. There may be factors to take into account outside of a basic virtual-to-virtual migration.

Replace a cloud Conductor

If you are replacing a Conductor in the Cloud, re-IPing it to match the previous Conductor may not be possible. For this reason, it is best practice to use a DNS hostname rather than an IP address to connect your Airwall Edge Services to your Conductor, and simply change your DNS records once you have a new Conductor restored from backup.