Introduction

Note

These guides were reorganized in August 2026. The previous Solution Design Guide and Operating Guides (Adoption, Standardization, Scaling) have been replaced with three role-based guide types: Installation, Administration, and User. Read the HVD 2.0 release notes for full details on what changed and where to find the content you need.

Why use HashiCorp Validated Designs?

HashiCorp Validated Designs (HVD) provide practitioners with opinionated guidance for achieving production-grade deployments of HashiCorp products. These designs are purpose-built for delivering foundational use cases, with a baseline level of architectural and operational maturity. They draw on the field experiences of Solutions Engineers and Solutions Architects working with customers across a wide range of environments and organizational requirements.

Each guide provides access to an opinionated reference architecture, including key design decisions and the rationale behind them. Where applicable, guides identify modular design components that you can adjust to align with organizational or regulatory requirements without compromising the overall integrity of the implementation. For many deployments we include Terraform modules to automate large portions of infrastructure provisioning and software installation.

Audience

This Administration Guide is for platform, security, identity, and operations teams that run Vault Enterprise as a shared service after installation is complete. It assumes the Vault cluster is deployed, initialized, unsealed, and reachable by operators and automation.

Use this guide for recurring day-2 administration: operating model, namespaces, authentication, policies, secrets-engine administration, monitoring, backup and restore, disaster recovery operations, upgrades, and support readiness. For deployment architecture and first-run setup, use the Vault Installation Guide for virtual machines or the Vault Installation Guide for OpenShift. For application and service-team consumption workflows, use the Vault User Guide.

Scope

This guide covers day-2 platform operation of Vault Enterprise:

Area	Summary
People and process	Team responsibilities, producer and consumer workflows, and operating-model guidance.
Organizational concepts	Namespaces, secrets engines, policies, and Terraform-based platform administration patterns.
Identity and access	Ongoing authentication method, MFA, policy, and application-auth administration.
Secrets-engine administration	Operator setup and governance for static secrets, Secrets Sync, dynamic secrets, PKI, key management, Transit, and Transform.
Observability and response	Audit logs, operational logs, monitoring, incident response, and replication monitoring.
Operations	Backup, restore, disaster recovery, upgrades, and support readiness.

Prerequisites

Before using this guide, complete the relevant installation track and confirm that Vault is running in the target environment. Operators should also have administrative access to Vault, access to the organization's identity provider, and access to the infrastructure and monitoring systems used by the deployment.