Planned failover of applications

Failover prepares to host the selected applications by synchronizing the data between the clusters. It creates the PVs that is needed by the applications to access data. Failover reverses the direction of replication.

Before you begin

As a prerequisite, make sure that the corresponding applications on this cluster are scaled to zero to prevent write conflicts.

About this task

Go through the following points before you do a planned failover of applications:
  • Important: In this document, the site where you enroll applications is called the primary site and its partner site or cluster is called the secondary site. After you do a planned failover, the cluster or site where the application is running is the primary site for that application. The partner is the secondary site.
  • The planned failover must be run only from the primary site of the application.
  • Events for degraded NFS and failed cluster status are generated for enrollments and failover, and they get removed automatically after some time.

Procedure

  1. Go to Disaster Recovery > Replicated applications.
  2. Click Actions > Relocate.
    The Relocate page is displayed. The table lists applications local to the cluster that you have logged in.
  3. Select the applications you want to relocate to the partner cluster.
  4. Click Failover.
    If one or more of the selected applications have backup policies assigned, then an Attention window is displayed. Backup policies continue to run for these applications on the current cluster. To avoid unnecessary backups, remove policies from the applications on the current cluster.
  5. In the Attention window, click OK.
  6. In the Replicated applications page, check the status of the Primary cluster.
    Initially, the status of the primary cluster for the application is Failing over. After successful completion of the failover, the primary cluster of the given application must be changed to secondary site or partner cluster. The partner cluster must be changed to the old primary cluster. After completion, it displays
    Relocate icon
    icon next to the name of the Primary cluster, and a Failover complete notification is displayed. The IBM Storage Fusion HCI System prepares the cluster for deployment of the relocated applications.

What to do next

You may observe issues post the failover. For more information about these issues, see Regional-DR issues.

After the failover is complete, deploy the applications on the new primary site.