Dell PowerStore Protecting Your Data

Planned Failover

When you perform a planned failover, the replication session is manually failed over from the source system to the destination system. Before failover starts, the destination system is synchronized with the source system, to prevent any data loss.

Before performing a planned failover, ensure that you stop I/O operations for any applications and hosts. You cannot pause a replication session that is undergoing a planned failover.

During a planned failover, you can take the following actions:

• Perform an unplanned failover.
• Delete the replication session by deleting the protection policy on the storage resource.

You cannot initiate a planned failover when a failover test is in progress.

You can initiate a planned failover test from the current source data, or from any snapshot.

There are two ways to initiate a planned failover:

• From Protection > Replication, select the relevant replication session, and then select Planned Failover.
• From the Protection tab of the resource, select Replication, and then select Planned Failover.

For synchronous replication, planned failover can be initiated from the source system when the replication session is in Operating Normally state. Because data is fully synchronized between the systems no data loss is caused by the failover. However, it is recommended to stop I/O operations for applications and hosts before initiating failover.

After a planned failover, the replication session is inactive. To synchronize the destination storage resource and resume the replication session, use the Reprotect action. You can also select the auto-reprotect option before failing over, which automatically initiates the synchronization in the opposite direction (at the next RPO) after the failover is complete, and returns the source and the target system to a normal state.