Guidelines for Activating and Deactivating a Protection Group

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When you activate a protection group, the protection group assumes the role that you assigned to it during configuration. When you deactivate a protection group, its application resource groups are also unmanaged.

You can activate or deactivate a protection group in the following ways:

Globally – Activates or deactivates a protection group on both clusters where the protection group is configured.
On the primary cluster only – Secondary cluster remains inactive.

When a protection group is activated on the primary cluster, the application resource groups that are configured for the protection group are also started. The Geographic Edition software uses the following Oracle Solaris Cluster commands on the primary cluster to bring the resource groups online:
```
# clresourcegroup online -eM resource-group-list
```
On the secondary cluster only – Primary cluster remains inactive.

When you activate a protection group, the data replication product that you are using determines the clusters on which data replication can start. The following sections describe additional behaviors when you activate or deactivate a particular data replication product:

Effects of Activating an Availability Suite Protection Group

The Availability Suite feature allows data replication to start only from the primary cluster. So, if you activate a protection group from the secondary cluster, data replication does not start.

Effects of Activating and Deactivating an EMC SRDF Protection Group

Activating and deactivating protection group on a cluster has the following effect on the data replication layer:

When activated, the data replication configuration of the protection group is validated. During validation, the current local role of a protection group is compared with the configuration of the EMC SRDF device groups.
- If the EMC SRDF device group is not in a Failedover state, the local role of the protection group should match the role of the EMC SRDF device group.
- If the EMC SRDF device group is in a Failedover state, then the local role of the protection group becomes secondary while the role of the EMC SRDF device group remains primary.
Data replication is started on the data replication device groups that are configured for the protection group, no matter whether the activation occurs on a primary or secondary cluster. Data is always replicated from the cluster on which the local role of the protection group is primary to the cluster on which the local role of the protection group is secondary.
Deactivating an EMC SRDF protection group on a cluster has the following effect on the data replication layer:
- The data replication configuration of the protection group is validated. During validation, the current local role of the protection group is compared with the aggregate device group state. If validation is successful, data replication is stopped.
- Data replication is stopped on the data replication device groups that are configured for the protection group, whether the deactivation occurs on a primary or secondary cluster.
Deactivating an EMC SRDF protection group has the following effect on the application layer:
- When a protection group is deactivated on the primary cluster, all of the application resource groups configured for the protection group are stopped and unmanaged.
- When a protection group is deactivated on the secondary cluster, the resource groups on the secondary cluster are not affected. Application resource groups that are configured for the protection group might remain active on the primary cluster, depending on the activation state of the primary cluster.
The EMC SRDF command that is used to stop data replication depends on the RDF state of the EMC SRDF device group.

The following table describes the EMC SRDF command that is used to stop data replication for each of the possible combinations of factors.

Table 7-1 Commands Used to Stop EMC SRDF Data Replication

Aggregate Device Group State	Valid Local Protection Group Role	EMC SRDF Command
`Split`, `Suspended, Partitioned,` or `Failover`	`primary` or `secondary`	No command is run because no data is being replicated.
`Synchronized` or `R1Updated`	`primary` or `secondary`	The `symrdf split` command is run.

Effects of Activating an Oracle Data Guard Protection Group

The Oracle Data Guard software allows data replication to start only if you activate a protection group in one of the following ways:

Locally from the primary cluster.
Globally from either the primary or the standby cluster.

So, if you attempt to activate an Oracle Data Guard protection group locally from the standby cluster, data replication does not start. However, if you activate the protection group globally from the standby cluster, data replication does start.