SF HA/DR With VVR Testing While Primary is Active
Created: 21 Oct 2012 | Updated: 25 Oct 2012 | 3 comments
This issue has been solved. See solution.
Hi All,
I have a customer with SF HA/dr with VVR for Oracle (two servers in primary, one in secondary) on RHEL 5.
SF version is 5.1 SP1 RP2.
The customer would like to test DR site, without taking the primary site offline.
I cannot use Fire Drill due to various reasons.
What the customer would like is to dissconnect the network between sites, then bring the DR online, test the DB (connect an application to it) and then shut the DR site down and reconnect the replication lines.
All this should be done while the primary site is active.
From what I understand, as soon as I disconnect the line between the sites, I have to run a takeover on the DR site to enable data access and mount the volumes, but this will result in an primary-primary configuration error once I'll reconnect the sites.
Usually this is resolved by taking the original primary (now acting secondary) and forcing it to be a secondary, but I obviously cannot do that since the primary has to remain active at all times and will be more updated when I'll finish testing the DR.
So, is there a way to perform this task without destroying all the configuration when done or without leaving the DR site as a primary?
Ideally, I would like to perform the following:
1. Disconnect the links (Planning to do so by taking IP resource offline)
2. Mount the volumes at the DR site
3. Start the DB at DR site and test it
4. Stop the DB and unmount volumes
5. reconnect the links and mark the DR site as secondary.
Help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Yair
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Comments 3 Comments • Jump to latest comment
Firstly, can you not over come the reasons you cannot do a Firedrill as this is the best solution - only reasons I can think of is:
Are these the reasons?
You can do what you want to do, however, after testing DR site, you must make DR a secondary (run vxrvg makesecondary) BEFORE you reconnect, otherwise the Primary will become an acting secondary. You will have to do a full resync, so I would also detach rlinks before reconnecting network. Here is what I would do
Mike
UK Symantec Consultant in VCS, GCO, SF, VVR, VxAT on Solaris, AIX, HP-ux, Linux & Windows
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Thanks Mike, this is a great step by step guide!
I just tried it in a Test environment and it works perfectly.
One additional note - I had to make the DB SG local in order to online it while the primary SG was online, ohterwise I would get an error.
I really appreciate your help with this issue.
Yair
Ah yes, forget step to make global service group a local group for the duration of the test.
Mike
UK Symantec Consultant in VCS, GCO, SF, VVR, VxAT on Solaris, AIX, HP-ux, Linux & Windows
If this post has helped you, please vote or mark as solution
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