The scenario leading to a successful reprotection is one after a planned migration. In the case of a planned migration there are no failures in either the storage or compute environment that preceded the recovery operation. Therefore, reversing recovery plans/protections groups and swapping and establishing replication in the reverse direction is possible.
If failed-over virtual machines eventually has to be returned to the original site or if they require PowerFlex replication protection, it is recommended to run a reprotect operation as soon as possible after a migration.
Reprotect is only available after a recovery operation has occurred, which is indicated by the recovery plan being in the Recovery complete state. Later versions of SRM warn the user about Reprotect needed as shown in the figure below.
A reprotect can be run by selecting the appropriate recovery plan and then selecting the REPROTECT links as shown in the figure below.
- Reverses protection groups. The protection groups are deleted on the original protection SRM server and are re-created on the original recovery SRM server. The inventory mappings are configured (assuming the user has preconfigured them in SRM on the recovery site) and the necessary shadow or placeholder VMs are created and registered on the newly designated recovery SRM server.
- Reverses recovery plan. The failed-over recovery plan is deleted on the original recovery SRM server and re-created with the newly reversed protection group.
- Swaps personality of PowerFlex RCG pairs. The PowerFlex SRA performs a swap on the target pairs which enables replication to be established back to the original site. Target becomes source and conversely.
- Reestablishes replication. After the swap, the PowerFlex SRA incrementally reestablishes replication between the RCG pairs, but in the opposite direction from what it was before the failover/migration.
The PowerFlex UI events log records the reversal of replication. An example is shown in the figure below.
The following figure demonstrates the steps involved in a reprotect operation.