Relocating a Subscription-based application between managed clusters

Relocate an application to its preferred location when all managed clusters are available.

Before you begin

  • When the primary cluster is in a state other than Ready, check the actual status of the cluster as it might take some time to update. Relocate can be performed only when both primary and preferred clusters are up and running.
    1. Navigate to RHACM console > Infrastructure > Clusters > Cluster list tab.
    2. Check the status of both the managed clusters individually before performing a relocate operation.
  • Perform relocate when lastGroupSyncTime is within the replication interval (for example, 5 minutes) when compared to current time. This is recommended to minimize the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for any single application.
    Run this command on the Hub Cluster:
    oc get drpc -o yaml -A | grep lastGroupSyncTime

    Example output:

    [...]
lastGroupSyncTime: "2023-07-10T12:40:10Z"

    Compare the output time (UTC) to current time to validate that all lastGroupSyncTime values are within their application replication interval. If not, wait to Relocate until this is true for all lastGroupSyncTime values.

Procedure

  1. Relocate the protected application using either of the following paths:
    Option 1: From the Applications page
    1. On the Hub cluster, navigate to All Clusters > Applications.
    2. In the Overview tab, at the end of the application row from the action menu (⋮), select Manage diaster recovery.

    3. Click Relocate.

    Option 2: From the Protected Applications page
    • On the Hub cluster, navigate to Data Services > Disater recovery > Protected Applications > Actions (⋮) > Relocate.
  2. When the Relocate application modal is shown, select Policy and Target cluster to which the associated application will relocate to in case of a disaster.
  3. By default, the subscription group that will deploy the application resources is selected. Click the Select subscription group dropdown to verify the default selection or modify this setting.
  4. Check the status of the Relocation readiness.
    • If the status is Ready with a green tick, it indicates that the target cluster is ready for failover to start. Proceed to step 5.
    • If the status is Unknown or Not ready, then wait until the status changes to Ready.
    Important:

    If there are data inconsistencies caused by synchronization delays, a warning message appears stating Inconsistent data on target cluster. This alerts to the possibility of data loss if the failover is initiated. The message is no longer displayed when data synchronization is complete.

  5. Click Initiate.
    All the system workloads and their available resources are now transferred to the target cluster.
  6. In the DR status column, you can view the progress of the failover. The modal shows the progress of the failover as Preparing > Syncing > Restoring > Clean up.
  7. Verify that the activity status shows as Relocated for the application.
    1. Navigate to the Applications > Overview tab.
    2. In the Data policy column, click the policy link for the application you applied the policy to.
    3. On the Data Policy popover page, click the View more details link.
    4. Verify that you can see one or more policy names and the ongoing activities (Last sync time and Activity status) associated with the policy in use with the application.