Failover and failback

The failover operation is the process of switching to a backup facility in the event of a failure.

• If the preferred and active PBHA storages is not functioning or inaccessible, then the system enters failover state.
• VM Deployed is not affected in the failover state. The ongoing I/O operation is also not affected. However, the new VM deploys cannot be performed.
• Notification is sent every 15 minutes that storage has entered failover state, and then storage will finally go to Error state.
• If the storage is in an error state, you must perform Edit Connection for storage to update the IP to redirect to the secondary storage management system.
• After the IP update, storage reverts to the available state and operations like volume create, resize, delete, and detach can be resumed.
• The deploy and attach operations will not work in a failover state.

The failback operation is the process of returning to the original state after a failure or a scheduled maintenance period.

• When the preferred storage management system is back up, we are entering failback state.
• PowerVC partition replication_status is updated to Enabled.
• A notification is generated informing that the storage has failed back and you must perform Edit Connection to change the IP back to the preferred management system.
• Volume create and other operation does not work until Edit connection action is performed.
• Edit storage and update the IP back to preferred active management system.
• This restores the operations back to normal.