Skip to main content
Sign Out

Welcome to Dell

My Account
  • Place orders quickly and easily
  • View orders and track your shipping status
  • Create and access a list of your products
Sign In Create an Account Premier Sign In Partner Program Sign In
Contact Us

Your Dell.com Carts

Dell PowerFlex Rack with PowerFlex 3.x Administration Guide

PDF

Running a test failover

Use this procedure to run a test failover of the latest copy of snapshots of source and target systems before running a failover.

About this task

Running a test failover provides the following:
  • Enables you to perform resource-intensive operations on secondary storage without impacting production
  • Test application upgrades on the target system without production impact
  • Ability to attach different, and higher-performing compute systems or media in the target environment
  • Ability to attach systems with different hardware attributes such as GPUs in the target domain
  • Ability to run analytics on the data without impeding your operational systems
  • Perform what-if actions on the data because that data will not be written back to prod
  • Eliminates many manual storage tasks because the test is fully automated along with the snapshots

Prerequisites

Ensure replication is still running and is in a healthy state.

Before running a test failover, map the target volumes with appropriate access mode. By default, volumes are mapped with read_write access. This creates a conflict with the mapping of target volumes, since Powerflex set the remote access mode of the Replication Consistency Group (RCG) point-of-view to read_only. This is incompatible with the default mapping access mode of read_write volume mapping offered by the Powerflex GUI, therefore log onto the target system and manually map all volumes in the RCG to the target system using scli command.

Example: # scli --map_volume_to_sdc --volume_name volume1 --sdc_id 47c091f200000004 --access_mode read_only

Once the remote volumes are mapped, we can test the RCG failover, the test failover command:
  • Creates a snapshot on the target system for all volumes attached to the RCG.
  • Replaces the pointer used by the volume mapping for each volume with a pointer to its snapshot.
  • Changes the access mode of the volume mapping of each volume on the target system to read_write.

A test failover operation is only possible after the peers are synchronized.

Steps

  1. From the PowerFlex GUI, in the left pane, click Protection > RCGs.
  2. In the right pane, select the relevant RCG check box, and click More > Test Failover.
  3. In the RCG <RCG name> Test Failover dialog box, click Start Test Failover.
  4. In the RCG <RCG name> Test Failover using target volumes dialog box, click Proceed.
  5. Verify that the operation completed successfully and click Dismiss.

Rate this content

Accurate
Useful
Easy to understand
Was this article helpful?
0/3000 characters
  Please provide ratings (1-5 stars).
  Please provide ratings (1-5 stars).
  Please provide ratings (1-5 stars).
  Please select whether the article was helpful or not.
  Comments cannot contain these special characters: <>()\