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Verifying the DR readiness of a VVR setup

When setting up a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution, it is very important to verify the effectiveness of the DR solution. Although VVR guarantees that integrity of data is maintained between the Primary and Secondary data volumes, validating data is necessary to ensure that there has been no data loss due to administrative error, user error, or some other technical reasons. Validation also helps you to be certain that the data that has been replicated to the Secondary (Disaster Recovery site) can be used to bring up the applications in case of a disaster.

The way to validate the DR readiness of the DR site is to bring up the application on the DR site. This can be done in two ways. One is to migrate the Primary role to the Secondary and then run the applications on the new Secondary using the replicated data. Another way of performing a firedrill is using the snapshot feature. Using this feature VVR creates snapshots of the data volumes that can be used to bring up the application on the Secondary.

Data validation can be used to verify the integrity of the data that has been replicated to the Secondary from the Primary. This is done by comparing the data with the data on the Primary. When the Secondary data volumes are validated after the replication has been stopped, the volumes are dissociated from an RVG. This could be very useful in case you want to validate the data volume before adding it back to the RDS. However, data can also be validated online, that is, when the replication is in progress. This is achieved by using the instant space-optimized snapshot feature to create point in time snapshots of the primary and secondary data volumes. In this case, instead of the actual volumes the snapshot volumes are compared and validated. For information on the methods to create the snapshots, refer to Creating RVG snapshots.

VVR enables you to validate the DR Readiness of the Secondary by using one of the following methods.