Use Cases for Disaster Recovery for Dell
Introduction
Superna Disaster Recovery Edition supports several distinct workflows for exercising a failover, and choosing the right one depends on what you are trying to accomplish. A real event calls for a full production failover that redirects clients and applications to the target cluster. Ongoing readiness testing calls for something that validates the same automation without touching production. And troubleshooting or planning work sometimes calls for a clear, ordered view of the individual storage-layer actions that make up a failover, independent of which orchestration workflow triggers them.
This section walks through each of these use cases:
- Execute Failover covers running a full failover with the Eyeglass Failover Wizard, including pre-checks, configuration, execution, monitoring, and log retrieval. Use this workflow for an actual planned or unplanned failover event.
- DR Rehearsal Mode lets you validate write access to data at the DR site without completing a full failover or redirecting production clients. It is the lightest-weight way to confirm a target cluster is ready to accept writes, and it leaves production largely undisturbed for the duration of the test.
- Simulated Disaster Event runs a complete, uncontrolled-failover test using a dedicated Runbook Robot test policy. Unlike DR Rehearsal Mode, this exercises client redirection end-to-end, making it the closest approximation to a real disaster without risking production data.
- Storage Failover Steps is an ordered reference of the underlying storage-layer actions for Non-DFS/DFS Type and Access Zone/IP Pool failover, noting which steps Eyeglass automates and which require manual action. Use this as a reference when planning a failover design or troubleshooting an incomplete one.
Choosing between these use cases generally comes down to risk tolerance and scope: DR Rehearsal Mode for quick, low-impact write-access checks; Simulated Disaster Event for a full end-to-end readiness test; Execute Failover when a real failover is required; and Storage Failover Steps whenever you need to understand or verify the individual steps behind any of the above.