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XenCenter
2024 8.2.7
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Failover

October 2, 2024
Contributed by: 
X X

Failover recovers VMs and vApps to a secondary site in the event of disaster at your primary site. To fail over your critical VMs and vApps, use the Disaster Recovery wizard.

Important:

The Disaster Recovery wizard does not control any storage array functionality. Disable duplication (mirroring) of the metadata storage and the storage used by the VMs to be restarted before you attempt failover to your recovery site.

To fail over VMs and vApps to a secondary site:

  1. In XenCenter, select the secondary pool, and on the Pool menu, click Disaster Recovery to open the Disaster Recovery wizard.

  2. Select Failover and then click Next.

    Note:

    If you use Fibre Channel shared storage with LUN mirroring to replicate the data to the secondary site, break mirroring before you attempt to recover data. This action gives the secondary site Read/Write access.

  3. Select the storage repositories (SRs) containing the pool metadata for the VMs and vApps that you want to recover. By default, the list on this wizard page shows all SRs that are currently attached within the pool. To scan for more SRs, choose Find Storage Repositories and then select the storage type to scan for:
    • To scan for all the available Hardware HBA SRs, select Find Hardware HBA SRs.
    • To scan for software iSCSI SRs, select Find Software iSCSI SRs and then enter the target host, IQN, and LUN details in the dialog box.

    When you have selected the required SRs in the wizard, click Next to continue.

  4. Select the VMs and vApps that you want to recover. Use the Power state after recovery option to specify whether you want the wizard to start the recovered VMs and vApps immediately. Alternatively, you can wait and start the VMs and vApps manually after failover is complete.

  5. Click Next to progress to the next wizard page and begin failover prechecks.

    The wizard performs pre-checks before starting failover. For example, the wizard ensures all the storage required by the selected VMs and vApps is available. If any storage is missing at this point, you can click Attach SR on this page to find and attach the relevant SR.

  6. Resolve any issues on the prechecks page, and then click Failover to begin the recovery process.

    A progress page is displayed showing whether recovery was successful for each VM and vApp.

    Failover can take some time depending on the number of VMs and vApps you are recovering. During this process, the following actions occur:

    • Metadata for the VMs and vApps is exported from the replicated storage
    • VMs and vApps are re-created in the primary pool
    • SRs containing the virtual disks are attached to the re-created VMs
    • VMs are started, if specified

  7. When the failover is complete, click Next to see the summary report.

  8. Click Finish on the summary report page to close the wizard.

After your primary site is available again, you can return the VMs and vApps to that site. To complete this process, follow the Disaster Recovery wizard again, but instead select the Failback option. For more information, see Failback.

XenServer 8

Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 Cumulative Update 1

Failover
October 2, 2024
Contributed by: 
X X
October 2, 2024
Contributed by: 
X X

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