SRM 5.8 Failover

SRM 5.8 Failover

January 5, 2015 8 By Eric Shanks

A terrible thing has happened and it’s time to failover your datacenter to your disaster recovery site.  Well, maybe you’re just migrating your datacenter to a new one, but this is always a bit of a tense situation.  Luckily we’ve had the opportunity to test the failovers many, many times before so we can be confident in our process.

Go to the Recovery Plan and click the monitor tab.  Click the “BIG RED BUTTON” (yeah, it’s not that big, but it has big consequences).
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Before the failover actually happens, you’ll be given a warning and you actually have to click a check box stating that you understand the consequences of performing this operation.  After that you’ll be given the opportunity to do a Planned Migration which will try to replicate the most recent changes and will stop if an error is encountered, or a Disaster Recovery migration which will just failover anything it can and as fast as it can.  Pick your recovery type and click Next.SRM58-Fail1

Review the process that is about to happen and click Finish.

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While the recovery is running, you’ll be able to monitor the process on the recovery steps screen.  Notice that this is slightly different from a test recovery in a few places, such as not creating a writable snapshot but rather making the existing storage writable in the new datacenter.   Hopefully everything is working well for you after the failover.  SRM58-Reprotect1

Now it’s time to go back to our original datacenter.  Click the “Re-Protect” button which looks like a shield with a lightning bolt on it.  This Re-Protect will reverse the direction of the replication and setup a failover in the opposite direction.  You can consider the DR site to be the protected site and the original production site to be the recovery site, until you fail back.

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When you run the Re-Protect, you’ll need to once again confirm that you understand the ramifications of this operation.

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Now that everything is reversed, you can run another failover, but this time a “Planned Migration” is probably more reasonable since you’re likely planning to do a failback and it’s not a second disaster, this time at your disaster recovery site.  (That would be awful)

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Review the failover and click Finish.  When the failover is done, be sure to Re-Protect it again to get your disaster recovery site back in working order!

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Summary

Failovers can be stressful but thankfully we’ve tested all of our plans before, so that should take some of the pressure off.