The recovery option Planned migration assures a graceful migration of virtual machines from a local vCenter to a remote vCenter. Any errors that the recovery plan encounters immediately fails the operation and requires the user to remediate these errors and restart the migration process. Therefore, a planned migration assumes the following things (among other minor details):
- The protected and recovery VMware environments are up and running (including ESXi hosts, vCenter, virtual machines, SRM server, and so on.) without issues.
- The storage environment is stable and configured properly. This includes one or more arrays, the fabric (SAN) and the PowerFlex Gateway or PowerFlex Manager UI interface.
- No network connectivity issues.
Before running a recovery plan failover, Dell Technologies recommends testing the recovery plan first, preferably multiple times. Information on configuring and running a recovery test is available in the section Test Failover.
The first step is to ensure that each PowerFlex volume pair in the RCG is in a proper state. The pairs should be in a Consistent state as shown for PowerFlex 3 and 4 in the figure below.
Similarly, the Status in SRM should show a blue directional arrow with Forward as shown in the figure below. This indicates that the pair is valid for planned migration. If the Status column shows a different message, such as green arrows with Failover in Progress, either manual intervention is required or the disaster recovery option needs to be selected instead of planned migration.
While the Status column is, in general, a good indicator of PowerFlex pair states, it is inadequate to cover all pair states. It is advisable to use the PowerFlex 3 or 4 UI to determine the exact status.
A planned migration can be initiated by selecting the appropriate recovery plan and selecting the RUN link as shown in the figure below.
Once the Recovery link has been selected, a short confirmation wizard appears asking to confirm the initiation of the recovery operation and in which mode the recovery plan should be run.
In this example, the default Planned migration is chosen. The check box must be selected to proceed. This screen is shown in the figure below.
When the wizard completes, the recovery operation commences. When a recovery plan reaches the Change recovery site storage to writable step, as shown in the figure below, the SRA performs a failover operation on the devices in the protection group.
The PowerFlex UI indicates that the RCG State is in Failover as shown in the figure below.