Veritas Volume Manager 5.1 SP1 Administrator"s Guide (5900-1506, April 2011)

Fire drill — testing the configuration
Warning: To avoid potential loss of service or data, it is recommended that you do
not use these procedures in a production environment.
After validating the consistency of the volumes and disk groups at your sites, you
should validate the procedures that you will use in the event of the various possible
types of failure. A fire drill lets you test that a site can be brought up cleanly during
recovery from a disaster scenario such as site failure.
Simulating site failure
To simulate the failure of a site, use the following command to detach all the
devices at a specified site:
# vxdg -g diskgroup [-f] detachsite sitename
The -f option must be specified if any plexes configured on storage at the site are
currently online.
After the site is detached, the application should run correctly on the available
site. This step verifies that the primary site is fine. Continue the fire drill by
verifying the secondary site.
Verifying the secondary site
After detaching the primary site, verify whether the application starts correctly
on a secondary site. The fire drill ensures that the application can run on the
secondary if disaster strikes the primary site. These procedures assume that the
application is running correctly before the fire drill operation begins.
To verify the secondary site, import the detached site on a different host using
the following command:
# vxdg -o site=sitename import dgname
Then start the application. If the application runs correctly on the secondary site,
this step verifies the integrity of the secondary site.
Recovery from simulated site failure
After verifying the data on the secondary for a simulated site failure, deport the
disk group from the secondary site. Then reattach the site back to the primary
host.
Administering sites and remote mirrors
Fire drill — testing the configuration
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