Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 Administrator's Guide (September 2006)

432 Administering sites and remote mirrors
Fire drill — testing the configuration
Fire drill — testing the configuration
Caution: To avoid potential loss of service or data, it is recommended that you do not use
these procedures on a live system.
After validating that the consistency of the volumes and disk groups at your sites, you
should validate the procedures that you will use in the event of the various possible types
of failure. A fire drill allows you to test that a site can be brought up cleanly during
recovery from a disaster scenario such as site failure.
Simulating site failure
To simulate the failure of a site, use the following command to detach all the devices at a
specified site:
# vxdg -g diskgroup [-f] detachsite sitename
The -f option must be specified if any plexes configured on storage at the site are
currently online.
Recovery from simulated site failure
Use the following commands to reattach a site and recover the disk group:
# vxdg -g diskgroup [-o overridessb] reattachsite sitename
# vxrecover -g diskgroup
It may be necessary to specify the -o overridessb option if a serial split-brain condition
is indicated.
Failure scenarios and recovery procedures
Possible failure scenarios and recovery techniques are listed in the following table:
Failure scenario Recovery technique
Disruption of network link between sites. See “Recovery from a loss of site connectivity”
on page 433.
Failure of hosts at a site. See “Recovery from host failure” on page 433.
Failure of storage at a site. See “Recovery from storage failure” on
page 433.
Failure of both hosts and storage at a site. See “Recovery from site failure” on page 434.