Once the Nakivo Site Recovery Job has been configured, failed over VMs should be protected to avoid a single point of failure scenario.
In case of a disaster in the Primary site, VMs are failed over to the DR site to quickly restore services and data accessibility. Because source VMs are offline due to Primary Site failure, VMs running in the DR Site are not protected and they are the only working copies available.
If something bad occurs at the DR Site, you don't have any weapon available to quickly restore the affected VMs.
For this reason VMs running at the DR Site should be replicated in a temporary safe site until the Primary Site has been fixed. Nakivo Site Recovery provides the capability to configure automated replication when a VM failover process is completed.
Blog series
Nakivo Site Recovery: Job creation - pt.1
Nakivo Site Recovery: VMs Re-protect - pt.2
Nakivo Site Recovery: Failback - pt.3
Configure VMs Re-Protect in Nakivo Site Recovery
Create a new Replication Job for the replicated VMs and configure the replica from the DR Site to a temporary site. This allows to replicate the failed over VMs to a temporary site until the Primary Site has been fixed.
From the Jobs section, select the Site Recovery Job previously created and click Edit.
Select Run Jobs from the Actions list.
Select the Replication Job created to re-protect the DR replicas from the job list (in the example Replication DR Re-protect) and specify the Action options parameters. Click Save.
To give the replica some time to boot before starting the Replication Job, select Wait from the Actions job list.
Specify the desired Time to wait (for example 5 minutes) and Action options then click Save.
To run boot and Replication Job operations with the correct sequence, select Wait action and click Move up to move the Wait action before the Replication Job.
When the actions are arranged with the correct sequence, click Save. The Re-protection procedure has been completed.
Run the Failover with Re-protect
To verify if the configuration works as expected, we need to run the just configured Site Recovery Job.
From Nakivo Backup & Replication Jobs section, select the Site Recovery Job previously created and click Run > Run site recovery job.
Select Planned Failover and click Run. The failover operation is triggered for the selected VMs with an automatic re-protection of the VM replicas.
The Job performs the failover of replicated VMs to the DR Site.
After completing the failover operation source VMs in the Primary Site are powered off and the corresponding VM replicas are now running in the DR Site. Bear in mind that running VM replicas are now the only copies available in the infrastructure.
Completed the failover action, the Re-protect replica is triggered against the failed over VMs.
Now all configured VM replicas are running in the DR Site in a failover state and as soon as the Primary Site is restored, failed over VMs should be moved back from the DR Site.
Part 3 will cover the Failback procedure to move VMs back retaining changes occurred while running at DR site.
