Remote Replication Schedules (Disaster Recovery Failover)

By Lauren Grob on August 29, 2023 • ( 0 )

Remote replication schedules provide a mechanism for automatic replication of changes to volumes & shares to destination Storage Pool. On the destination Storage Pool the copied volumes and shares are referred to as checkpoints and are easily identified by their _chkpnt suffix. Replication schedules run on a delay timer which indicates the delay time between replications or a fixed schedule. If a calendar based replication schedule is still running when the schedule is to be run again it will delay until the next interval time. Interval based replication schedules have a set amount of delay time between each completed replication and will not activate again until the last transfer has completed plus the specified delay time has elapsed.

Creating Remote Replication Schedules

To create a schedule navigate to the ‘Volume & Share Replication Schedules’ section of the tree view after selecting the ‘Remote Replication’ tab at the top of the screen. Right-click on the section header and choose ‘Create Schedule…’. Alternatively, from the ‘Replication Schedule’ toolbar select Create as is shown below.

Navigation: Remote Replication –> Volume & Share Replication Schedules –> Replication Schedule –> Create (toolbar)

To access this dialog either click **Create** from the ‘Replication Schedule’ toolbar or right click on left or center panes for ‘Volume & Share Replication Schedules’ and click on **Create Schedule…”.**

Besides selection of the volumes and/or shares to be replicated you must select the number of snapshot checkpoints to be maintained on the local and remote systems as shown below. You can use these snapshots for off-host backup and other data recovery purposes as well so there is no need to have a Snapshot Schedule which would be redundant with the snapshots which will be crated by your replication schedule. If you choose a ‘Max Delta Points’ of 5 then up to 5 snapshot checkpoints will be retained. If for example you were replicating nightly at 1 a.m. each day of the week from Monday to Friday then you will have a week’s worth of snapshots as data recovery points. If you are replicating 4 times each day and need a week of snapshots then you would need 5×4 or a ‘Max Delta Points’ setting of 20.

Interval vs Calendar Schedules

Replication can be done on a schedule at specific times and days of the week or can be done continuously based upon an interval. The interval represents the amount of time between replication activities where no replication is done. The system automatically detects active schedules and will not active a given schedule again while any volumes or shares are still being replicated. As such the replication schedule interval is more of a delay interval between replications and can be safely set to a low value. Since only the changes are replicated it is often better to replicate more frequently to replicate throughout the day versus replicating all at once at the end of the day.

Navigation: Remote Replication –> Volume & Share Replication Schedules –> Replication Schedule –> Create (toolbar)