About setting up a disaster recovery fire drill

The disaster recovery fire drill procedure tests the fault-readiness of a configuration by mimicking a failover from the primary site to the secondary site. This procedure is done without stopping the application at the primary site and disrupting user access, interrupting the flow of replicated data, or causing the secondary site to need resynchronization.

The initial steps to create a fire drill service group on the secondary site that closely follows the configuration of the original application service group and contains a point-in-time copy of the production data in the Replicated Volume Group (RVG). Bringing the fire drill service group online on the secondary site demonstrates the ability of the application service group to fail over and come online at the secondary site, should the need arise. Fire drill service groups do not interact with outside clients or with other instances of resources, so they can safely come online even when the application service group is online.

You must conduct a fire drill only at the secondary site; do not bring the fire drill service group online on the node hosting the original application.

You can override the FireDrill attribute and make fire drill resource-specific.

Before you perform a fire drill in a disaster recovery setup that uses Volume Replicator, perform the following steps:

VCS also supports HA fire drills to verify a resource can fail over to another node in the cluster.

See About testing resource failover by using HA fire drills.

Note:

You can conduct fire drills only on regular VxVM volumes; volume sets (vset) are not supported.

VCS provides hardware replication agents for array-based solutions, such as Hitachi Truecopy, EMC SRDF, and so on . If you are using hardware replication agents to monitor the replicated data clusters, refer to the VCS replication agent documentation for details on setting up and configuring fire drill.