Note:

Enable Block Storage Logical Volume Manager Support in OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery

Introduction

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Full Stack Disaster Recovery (OCI Full Stack DR) orchestrates the transition of compute, database, and applications between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions from around the globe with a single click. Customers can automate the steps needed to recover one or more business systems without redesigning or re-architecting existing infrastructure, databases, or applications and without the need for specialized management or conversion servers.

Initial Deployment Architecture

Deployment Architecture

Note: Primary region is Frankfurt and standby region is London.

Objectives

Configure the newly introduced feature in OCI Full Stack DR that enables users to specify multiple mount points for a single block volume.

The following tasks will be covered in this tutorial.

Prerequisites

Task 1: Add instance vmapp01 to primary DR protection group.

  1. In the primary DR protection group (DRPG_BSS_LVM_FRA), select Members and Add member.

    Add new members

  2. Add the compute VM (vmapp01) as a member.

    Add new members

    Note: You can now specify multiple mount points for a single block volume mounted by Full Stack DR. You can also specify multiple mount points for a logical volume (LV) which can consist of multiple block volumes. Attachments and mounts are now completely independent of each other.

    Make sure that both primary and standby vm instances have the descriptive information about the filesystems.

    Add new members

Task 2: Add volume group vgapp01 to primary DR protection group.

  1. In the primary DR protection group (DRPG_BSS_LVM_FRA), select Members and add the Volume Group (vgapp01) as a member.

    Add new members

Task 3: Add instance vmapp01dr to standby DR protection group.

Repeat the same process indicated on the Task 1, but with the standby DR protection group DRPG_BSS_LVM_LON and the vm instance vmapp01dr.

Task 4: Generate a Switchover Plan

Switchover Plan: A type of DR plan that performs a planned transition of services from the primary DR protection group to the standby DR protection group.

  1. Create a switchover plan in standby DR protection group DRPG_BSS_LVM_LON.

  2. Select Plans and click Create plan.

    Switchover Plan

  3. Enter the Name as Switchover and select the Plan type as Switchover (planned).

    Switchover Plan

  4. Click Create.

    Switchover Plan

Task 5: Execute Switchover Plan in Standby DR protection group

Note:

Execute the prechecks for the switchover plan you just created in the current standby region, then execute the switchover plan if the prechecks succeed.

Execute prechecks as an independent operation first as a best practice.

  1. To begin, open the switchover plan in the standby region.

  2. Click Run Prechecks.

  3. A confirmation box will pop up. Click Run Prechecks in the confirmation box to continue.

    Switchover precheck

    Ensure the prechecks complete successfully as shown in the screenshot below. You may need to remediate any failed precheck steps at this point and then run the precheck again until all steps succeed.

    Switchover precheck status

Execute the Switchover plan.

  1. To begin, click Execute plan.

  2. A confirmation box will pop up. Click Execute plan in the confirmation box to continue.

  3. Monitor the plan execution to ensure all steps in the plan succeed.

    Run Disaster Recovery Plan

The following screenshot shows the successful completion of the switchover plan. However, you may encounter failed steps even though the prechecks completed successfully; there is a chance steps will fail as the recovery steps are being executed in reality. Remediate any failed steps and try again.

Run Disaster Recovery Plan Status

Task 6: Verify that the disks were mounted on the standby vm instance vmapp01dr

Connect to the standby VM instance vmapp01dr to display the information about total space and available space on a file system.

df -h

Volume Group

You can also list the Volume Groups created on the standby VM instance.

sudo vgs

Boot Volume

Next Steps

There are two best practices that should be incorporated into the normal day-to-day operations to help ensure the readiness of your DR plans.

Think about scheduling weekly prechecks of all DR plans in the standby DR Protection Group. Prechecks can be run at any time and have zero impact on production workloads. This will help ensure integrity of your DR plans, catching missing member resources, missing networks, the inability to find expected scripts called by user-defined steps, etc.

Another very important way of validating the readiness of your disaster recovery is to schedule periodic DR Drills once a month or quarter. DR Drills also have zero impact on production workloads, but give you the ability to validate recovery of compute, storage, Oracle databases and backend sets for load balancers in the standby region with the click of a single button. Learn more about Full Stack DR Drills.

Acknowledgments

More Learning Resources

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