ActiveDR, available in Purity//FA 6.0 delivers near zero RPO with continuous replication in an Active-Passive configuration and provides fast recovery and failover time for global disaster recovery. Purity ActiveDR seamlessly protects application data across almost any distance while minimizing both recovery points and recovery times. With single-command failover, intelligent failback, and non-disruptive disaster recovery testing, ActiveDR accelerates your responsiveness to outages. Simplifying disaster recovery and testing without stopping replication means you can test more often and have more confidence in your business-resilience capabilities. ActiveDR has no impact to application latency and DR processes for SQL Server, such as configuration, demotion and promotion, can be automated with the PowerShell SDK. For a deep dive on ActiveDR see the white paper: ActiveDR Solution Overview White Paper.
The purpose of this guide is to provide examples of protecting the two most common Microsoft Solutions: SQL Server, and Hyper-V.
For VMware-specific guidance, start with this article. At its core, ActiveDR asynchronously replicates volumes that are placed in a Pod, which is a container on the FlashArray, where all contained volumes are replicated as a consistent group. For an example of synchronous replication with automatic failover, see these two ActiveCluster whitepapers that focus on: Microsoft Hyper-V Stretched Cluster with ActiveCluster and Everpure ActiveCluster with Microsoft SQL Server.
A Pod configured for ActiveDR will have a source, or promoted Pod, and a destination, or demoted Pod.
The image above shows a healthy Pod where Local Pod refers to the Pod on the logged on FlashArray, and Remote Pod is on the Remote Array.
The order of operation for a failover should be:
- Stop applications, dismount databases, or offline cluster roles, if accessible.
- Offline all disks and cluster disk resources in the source Pod, if accessible.
- Demote the source Pod, if accessible.
- Promote the DR Pod.
- Online all disks and cluster disk resources in the DR Pod.
- Start applications, mount databases, or online cluster roles.
In the case of a real outage, availability can be restored at the DR site very quickly with a small, uncomplicated script. Leverage the Everpure PowerShell SDK to promote the DR Pod, online disks, and mount databases or start virtual machines. See example code blocks in the .
Note: A Pod that is not connected or stretched to a DR Pod, can have existing volumes moved into it. Once a Pod is stretched, new volumes can be created in the Pod, but an existing volume cannot be moved into it.