11. EnsureDR LIVE Failover Prerequisites

EnsureDR LIVE Failover Prerequisites

 

The LIVE Failover process should be performed only in two cases:

  • Production site is not available
  • Testing required by your internal company’s rules

 

Regardless of the reason for performing a LIVE Failover, you must be aware of how it will influence your environment. EnsureDR is an orchestrator for your data mover, so you need to know how the data mover you are using is configured and how your data mover will perform during the LIVE Failover process. EnsureDR doesn't have an influence on your data mover configuration during the LIVE Failover process, EnsureDR will just instruct your data mover to run a LIVE Failover process. You should only run the LIVE Failover process if you are fully aware of the consequences of using LIVE Failover option from your data mover. For more information about running the LIVE Failover process, please consult your data mover support documentation or open a ticket at the data mover site.

 

EnsureDR LIVE Failover

 

If you run into a situation where the production site is unavailable and you need to conduct business from the DR site, EnsureDR can help you automate the entire process by running LIVE Failover on the DR site. Depending on your data mover solution there are two possible cases:

  • Restore process based on VM level (NetApp, etc.)
  • Restore process based on a group of servers define in Recovery Plan (VMware SRM), VPG (Zerto), etc.

For VM based level restore process, EnsureDR will recover only servers that are specified inside the EDR job. You should be aware that your backup/replication solution data mover may have more servers defined inside the backup/replication job, but this does not influence the restore process triggered by EnsureDR. Because of that, our best practice is to put all servers inside the EDR job so in case of a disaster, all can be restored during a LIVE Failover process on the DR site.

For the restore process based on the groups defined in your data mover, all servers included in those groups will be restored regardless of whether you selected all servers in the EnsureDR job or not. For this reason, we recommend that you create multiple groups so that your less critical servers are the last to recover. Servers such as domain controllers, databases, and application servers must be put in groups that are restored first.

 

EnsureDR Prerequisites

 

To be able to run the LIVE Failover process inside EnsureDR on the DR site you need to meet some prerequisites:

  • EDRM server must be installed and configured on the DR site before the disaster happens
  • EDR job must be configured and tested in the DR site at least once to validate the restore process in a bubble environment before running the LIVE Failover process

 

The following data movers have by default enabled LIVE Failover option:

    • NetApp
    • VMware SRM
    • Zerto