Writes are sent to the Secondary in the order in which they are received at the Primary. VVR sends data to the Secondary RVG as a message encompassing an application write. This means VVR sends messages based on application write sizes. When the Secondary receives the message in VVR kernel memory, the Secondary immediately sends an initial acknowledgment of receipt. This is known as the network acknowledgment. The network acknowledgment allows the Primary to immediately continue processing, as required. The data is not yet written to disk on the Secondary RVG, but it is still safe because it is stored in the Primary SRL. After the Secondary writes to the local disk (either the Secondary SRL if configured, or to the secondary data volume), it sends the second acknowledgment, the data acknowledgment.

The reason for the two-phase acknowledgment is so that VVR can maintain application performance when it is configured in synchronous mode. If VVR were to wait for the write to complete on the Secondary as well as the Primary, it would increase latency considerably. Instead, the Primary waits for the network acknowledgment from the Secondary before it completes the write at the application. Because data is persistently queued in the Primary SRL, safety of the data for the Secondary is maintained.

VVR receives a packet into memory on the Secondary RVG, holds the packet until all the previous packets have been received, then writes to the data volumes in the correct sequence to maintain consistency at the Secondary. The writes to the data volumes use the Secondary SRL as a staging location if logging is enabled on the RVG. Secondary logging may be automatically disabled if all requirements for the feature are not met. Holding the packets in memory enables VVR to reassemble out-of-order network traffic before writing, and discover and handle missing packets. To maintain consistency at the Secondary RVG, VVR never writes an I/O out of order with the Primary RVG. VVR serializes and checksums incoming data from the Primary RVG to support accurate replay to the Secondary volumes.

See About secondary logging enabled asynchronous mode.