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Failing over a Hyper-V virtual machine

If you have not done so already, launch the Double-Take Console, then click the Monitor Connections button to manage failover.

Double-Take Console provides the ability to failover in the event of a failure of the source machine. Source servers may be failed over in two different ways: 

• Automatic Failover—The application detects that a failover condition is met and automatically initiates the failover process.
• Manual Failover—The user manually initiates the failover process by clicking the Failover button in the user interface.

The type of failover for the job is selected during job creation. For more information, see Setting protection options.

After the protection job completes the initial synchronization, failover will be enabled. To initiate failover, select the connection and click the Failover button on toolbar at the bottom of the Monitor Connections page.

When you select the Failover button, the following dialog box appears.

From here, you can select the type of failover to perform.

• Live failover—Select this option to perform a live failover with network connectivity to the target replica virtual machine. Live failover will shut down the source virtual machine (if available), stop the protection job, and start the replica virtual machine with full network connectivity.
• Test failover—Select this option to perform a test failover without network connectivity to the target replica virtual machine. Test failover will leave the source virtual machine online, suspend the protection job, and start the replica virtual machine on the target with no network connectivity. This feature allows you to periodically test the replica virtual machine to verify that it is working correctly.

After you select the type of failover to perform, click Failover.

Undoing failover

Once a live or test failover has been performed, it is possible to undo the failover by clicking on the Undo Failover button. Undoing failover will do the following:

1. The replica virtual machine will be shut down
2. The source virtual machine will be restarted (if it was shutdown with a live failover)
3. The protection will be restarted (a file difference mirror will be performed)

Note:

All changes made to the replica virtual machine while the job is in a failed over state will be lost when an Undo is performed.

Reversing failover

After a live failover has been performed, you can reverse the protection. This allows you to replicate target data back to the source. Select a protection that has already failed over, then click the Reverse protection button to start the protection in the reverse direction.

The job will start synchronization in the reverse direction. The job name and the log file name will change accordingly. When the restore completes, the job will be running in the opposite direction (that is, if the job had originally been running from server Indy to server Jersey, it will now be running from server Jersey to server Indy).

After the job completes synchronization back to the original source host, failback can be performed by clicking the Failover button.