User guide

Working with the AppAssure 5 Core | 51
About Failover and Failback in AppAssure 5
In the case of a severe outage in which your source core and agents fail, AppAssure
5 supports failover and failback in replicated environments. Failover refers to
switching to a redundant or standby target AppAssure Core upon system failure or
abnormal termination of a source core and associated agents. The main goal of
failover is to launch a new agent identical to the failed agent that was protected by
the failed source core. The secondary goal is to switch the target core into a new
mode so that the target core protects the failover agent in the same way as the
source core protected the initial agent before the failure. The target core can recover
instances from replicated agents and immediately commence protection on the
failed-over machines.
Failback is the process of restoring an agent and core back to their original states
(before failure). The primary goal of failback is to restore the agent (in most cases,
this is a new machine replacing a failed agent) to a state identical to the latest state
of the new, temporary agent. When restored, it is protected by a restored source
core. Replication is also restored, and the target core acts as a replication target
again. For more information, see “Roadmap for Failover and Failback” on page 65.
About Replication and Encrypted Recovery Points
While the seed drive does not contain backups of the source core registry and
certificates, the seed drive does contain encryption keys from the source core if the
recovery points being replicated from source to target are encrypted. The replicated
recovery points remain encrypted after they are transmitted to the target core. The
owners or administrators of the target core need the passphrase to recover the
encrypted data.
About Retention Policies for Replication
The retention policy on the source core determines the retention policy for the data
replicated to the target core, because the replication task transmits the merged
recovery points that result from a rollup or ad-hoc deletion.
For more information on retention policies, see “Managing Retention Policies” on
page 81.
The target core is not capable of rollup or of ad-hoc deletion of recovery points. These actions can
only be performed by the source core.