HP StorageWorks Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant user's guide (T2558-96323, April 2009)

7 - 1
Failover
The Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant provides the ability
to failover to a replica virtual machine in the event of a failure of the
source machine. Source servers may be failed over in two different
ways:
 Automatic Failover—The application detects that a failover condition is met and automatically
initiates the failover process.
 Manual Failover—The user manually initiates the failover process by clicking the Failover
button in the user interface.
The type of failover for the job is selected during job creation. For more information, see Set
protection options on page 5-7.
During the failover process, the following steps are initiated by the Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery
Assistant:
1. The Storage Mirroring connection between the source machine and Virtual Recovery Appliance is
disconnected.
2. The VMware virtual drivers for video, mouse, disk controllers, and network adapters are injected
into the Windows registry on the target virtual disk.
3. The target virtual disk volumes are un-mounted and removed from the Virtual Recovery
Appliance.
4. If you are performing manual failover, the source machine is shut down.
5. The target virtual disk volumes are connected to the replica virtual machine.
6. The replica virtual machine is powered on.
Because of the nature of physical-to-virtual failover process, failback to the original source is not
possible with the Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant.
NOTE: For optimal virtual machine performance, Hewlett-Packard recommends that you install
VMtools on the replica virtual machine after failover is complete. In most cases, the
installation of VMtools will require the virtual machine to be rebooted.
NOTE: If a VirtualCenter server is used during job creation and failover is attempted while
VirtualCenter is offline, the failover process will not complete properly and the job will be
in an error state. To resolve this issue:
1. Using the VMware VI client, edit the virtual machine settings of the recovery
appliance. Remove the disk drives of the replica virtual machine, but DO NOT delete
the drives from disk.
2. Start the replica virtual machine.
3. Delete the protection job from the Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant
client. If asked whether or not to delete the associated replica virtual machine, DO
NOT delete the replica, then confirm the selection.