HP Insight Recovery 1.0 Online Help (Document Format)

8 Unplanned Failovers

Overview

An unplanned failover typically involves the occurrence of a site-wide disaster, without prior warning, at the

Primary Site. This event may involve a regional disaster (earthquake, massive flood), or a local event (water

main leak in the data center). The following section describes the steps necessary to recover from an unplanned

disaster using HP Insight Recovery.

Step 1: At the Primary Site

1. A disaster occurs at the Primary Site.

Step 2: At the original Recovery Site (to be changed to the new Primary Site)

1. Ensure that enough resources are available to run the Recovery logical servers, i.e. sufficient number

of blades (for Virtual Connect-based logical servers) and/or sufficient capacity on ESX hosts (for Virtual

Machine-based logical servers) that are licensed for HP Insight Recovery.

2. Using the HP Insight Recovery | Sites tab, click Change local site to Primary. A warning message

appears, explaining what changing to a Primary Site will do:

• HP Insight Recovery will prepare the storage replication group for read/write access, and activate

the associated logical servers. The order of failover is determined by the startup order associated

with each Recovery Group.

• The role of the site will be changed from a Recovery Site to a Primary Site.

Clicking Continue initiates the site role conversion, and brings up the Jobs screen allowing you to

monitor the progress of the conversion to a Primary Site.

Step 3: At the original Primary Site (to be changed to the new Recovery Site)

1. When the original Primary Site is repaired and operational again, the HP Insight Recovery DR Protected

logical servers must not be allowed to run, for example, when power is restored after a power outage,

to avoid "split-brain syndrome". One way to accomplish this is to inhibit auto power up for each and

every server that could be a potential target for a DR Protected logical server at either site, at the time

of HP Insight Recovery configuration.

2. Using the Command View EVA server, set the storage associated with each HP Insight Recovery DR

Protected logical server to be the destination target for storage replication.

3. Start the ESX servers.

4. Using the HP Insight Recovery | Sites tab, click Change local site to Recovery. A warning message

appears, explaining what changing to a Recovery Site will do:

• The logical server associated with each Recovery Group will be deactivated and disabled.

• The role of the site will be changed from a Primary Site to a Recovery Site.

Clicking Continue initiates the site role conversion, and brings up the Jobs screen allowing you to

monitor the progress of the conversion to a Recovery Site.

Notes

• If the operation to change the role of the site (Primary to Recovery or vice versa) fails for any reason,

the site role will not be changed. You must correct the problem (see “Monitoring Jobs”) and redo the

operation.

• Recovery Groups that have Maintenance Mode enabled will not be included in the Change Local Site

to Primary operation.