How to do a DR test with A V7000 at 7.6, Global Mirror and IBM I LPARS
Hello all, I have a question but first some background. I’ve been an IBM I admin since 1990, always with internal disks. I was handed two V7000 Gen 2 about two months ago so I’m REALLY new at this. The business partner left the DR system with images of the production systems from about a year ago. My boss asked to get replication up and running without using the business partner’s consultants. I have Draid6 the drives and thin provisioned all the DR volumes (free up space), I’ve gotten Global mirror w/ changed volumes up and running for a sandbox LPAR. I want to test without modifying the locked volumes on the target side. I know it will be a flashcopy of the target volumes but I can’t find any documentation that would walk me thru this procedure. I read about a “Reverse Restore” (reverseflash) which sounds like I will NOT have to remap the host volumes (that really scares me). I’ve been 99% GUI in working with system so if anyone knows where I could get some GUI screen shots on that procedure I will buy them lunch.
Hi,
If you simply stop the Global Mirror Change volumes consistency groups, and specify the "-access" flag on the CLI (there will be an equivalent check box on the GUI) - that will stop the replication and will enable the target volumes to be writable.
Then you can map those target volumes to some test hosts to check them out (it's not normally a good idea to map them back to the production host for a variety of reasons).
When you are finished with your testing you start up the consistency groups again. At that point, you will need to specify which direction you want to start up the consistency group. This is the most important step to get right. At this point you have two perfectly valid sets of data (one at each site). When you re-start the replication, then one of those two copies will be discarded, and be overwritten with the data from the other copy. I'm sure you can see why it's important to get that command right.
Hope that helps.
Andrew
Well I'm back, 18 months later. Management is talking an inter-agency DR test that will last two weeks to test procedures and firewall/network interconnects. That will be four LPAR's running IBM i. The State agencies will continue to work, all changes on the DR V7000 will be thrown away at the end. So, these are my thoughts: End production (Sync point) DR side - I create the Flash Copy volumes, then mappings and start. DR side - Map the DR host to the new Flash Copy volumes and IPL(activate) the hosts. Production side – IPL(activate) hosts and allow Global Mirror to continue. Test Bring down the DR hosts and remap to the original Global Mirror target volumes. Delete the Flash Copy mapping and volumes that were created at start of test.. Anything I'm missing? There will be very little database changes, can I use snapshot vs clone? Does anybody have a DR test script where I could pass a host name and do these steps programmatically, that I could adopt/modify?
Stu Haddock State of Oregon
Worked great...thanks