Managing recovery access using policy-based replication

During disaster recovery, or to use recovery volumes for later use, you can enable independent access on volumes group to recovery site. Enabling independent access allows host IO and configuration changes, such as creating volume, deleting volume and volume groups, and changing volume on a recovery site. Any changes to production site volumes are replicated to the recovery volumes. In order to keep a recovery image for later use, you can enable independent access to the recovery site volume.

Enabling independent access to a volume group on a recovery site suspends the replication between the production site and recovery site. You must enable independent access to the recovery volumes before you remove replication policy from both the site location. When the volume group is in independent mode, the volumes are accessible from a host. You can reconfigure mapping at any time and the volume group changes to recovery mode. The volume group appears offline on the host and cannot be available anymore for any configuration changes. The independent access option cannot be set to production site volume group and can set only to recovery site volume group. After independent access is enabled, you can verify the state of the volume group by using the lsvolumegroupreplication command or in the management GUI. You can use both management GUI and command-line interface to enable independent access to the volume group.

Using management GUI

To enable independent access on recovery site, complete these steps:
  1. In the management GUI, select Volumes > Volume Groups.
  2. On the Volume Groups page, select the volume groups on which a replication policy is associated.
  3. Under the Policies tab, click Replication status and select Enable independent access.
  4. On recovery copy menu, click Replication status > Enable independent access.
  5. On Enable independent access page, click Enable. When you enable access to the recovery copy, replication is suspended. You can make configuration changes to each copy independently or configure host access to these copies.
    Note: If the connection is disrupted between the system, independent access is enabled when communication is reestablished.

Using command-line interface

  • You can use the following command to change the volume group mode to enable independent access: 
    chvolumegroupreplication -mode <independent> <volumegroup_name_or_id>
    where the -mode specifies the replication mode for the volume group.
  • After you recover from a disaster, you can restart the replication between the production volumes and recovery volumes. Use the following command: 
    chvolumegroupreplication -unsuspend <volumegroup_name_or_id>
    where unsuspend action allows replication to restart.