Running a successful fire drill in a campus cluster

Bring the fire drill service group online on a node within the system zone that does not have the application running. Verify that the fire drill service group comes online. This action validates that your solution is configured correctly and the production service group will fail over to the remote site in the event of an actual failure (disaster) at the local site.

You must take the fire drill service group offline before you shut down the node or stop VCS locally on the node where the fire drill service group is online or where the disk group is online. Otherwise, after the node restarts you must manually reattach the fire drill site to the disk group that is imported at the primary site.

Note:

For the applications for which you want to perform fire drill, you must set the value of the FireDrill attribute for those application resource types to 1. After you complete fire drill, reset the value to 0.

To run a successful fire drill

  1. Override the FireDrill attribute at the resource level for resources of the fire drill service group.
  2. Set the FireDrill attribute for the application resources to 1. This prevents the agent from reporting a concurrency violation, when the application service group and the fire drill service group are online at the same time.
  3. Bring the fire drill service group online.

    If the fire drill service group does not come online, review the VCS engine log to troubleshoot the issues so that corrective action can be taken as necessary in the production service group.

    Warning:

    You must take the fire drill service group offline after you complete the fire drill so that the failover behavior of the application service group is not impacted. Otherwise, when a disaster strikes at the primary site, the application service group cannot fail over to the secondary site due to resource conflicts.

  4. After you complete the fire drill, take the fire drill service group offline.
  5. Reset the Firedrill attribute for the resource to 0.
  6. Undo or override the Firedrill attribute from the resource level.