Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 for Oracle RAC Administrator"s Guide (5900-1512, April 2011)

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.
Before you perform a fire drill in a disaster recovery setup that uses VVR, perform
the following steps:
■ Set the value of the ReuseMntPt attribute to 1 for all Mount resources.
■ Configure the fire drill service group.
See “Configuring the fire drill service group using the Fire Drill Setup wizard”
on page 157.
■ After the fire drill service group is taken offline, reset the value of the
ReuseMntPt attribute to 0 for all Mount resources.
VCS also supports HA fire drills to verify a resource can fail over to another node
in the cluster.
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.
Configuring the fire drill service group using the Fire Drill Setup wizard
Use the Fire Drill Setup Wizard to set up the fire drill configuration.
157Administering SF Oracle RAC and its components
Administering SF Oracle RAC global clusters