Evaluating full-server protection

1. Login as a user that is a member of both the Double-Take Admin and local Administrators security groups.
2. Open the Full-Server Failover Manager.
3. Enter your source and target servers. You can click Browse when selecting either server to locate it by drilling down through your network. After you have specified a server name, enter login credentials when prompted. Once the server is selected and logged in, the Properties tab at the bottom of the Full-Server Failover Manager updates to display the server’s properties.

4. Optional protection settings are available but are not required for the evaluation. Feel free to review the optional settings, if desired. A complete description of each setting can be found in Optional full-server protection settings.
5. You must validate that your target is compatible with your source and can stand-in if the source fails. Click Validate configuration. The Validation tab at the bottom of the Full-Server Failover Manager updates to display the validation check. Errors are designated by a white X inside a red circle. Warnings are designated by a black exclamation point (!) inside a yellow triangle. A successful validation is designated by a white checkmark inside a green circle.

6. Double-click on any of the validation items to see details. You must correct any errors before you can enable protection. Depending on the error, you may be able to click Fix or Fix All and let Double-Take Availability correct the problem for you. For those errors that Double-Take Availability cannot correct automatically, you will need to modify the target to correct the error, or you can select a different target. You must revalidate the selected servers until the validation check passes without errors.
7. Once the validation check passes without errors, click Enable Protection to begin monitoring.

After you have enabled full-server protection, you can monitor the protection from the Full-Server Failover Manager. The Protection Status is displayed in the right center of the Full-Server Failover Manager. You can tell the status of your protection from this field.

1. Watch as the mirroring percentage increases. When the mirroring is complete, the status will change to Enabled.
2. Look at your target and you will see the data from the source.

Once protection is Enabled, if the source should fail, the target can stand-in for the source.

In order to test replication, you need to change the data on your source. This includes modifying existing files, creating new files, deleting files, and changing permissions and attributes.

1. On the source, browse through the directories and files.
2. Select four data files from your source and record the file name, date, time, and file size for each file.
3. On your target, locate those same four files that you just identified on your source. The files on the target match the files on the source.
4. Back on your source, view the contents of one of your data files and note the file contents.
5. On your target, view that same file that you just viewed on the source. The file contents on the target match the file contents on the source.
6. On your source, edit the file that you viewed above and save your changes.
7. Modify the other three files so that the date, time, and/or size is updated.
8. Verify the changes that you made on the source have been applied to the target copy of the file.

Note:

Because of the way the Windows Cache Manager handles memory, machines that are doing minimal or light processing, as you are in this evaluation, may have file operations that remain in the cache until additional operations flush them out. This may make Double-Take Availability files on the target appear as if they are not synchronized. When the Windows Cache Manager releases the operations in the cache on the source, the files will be updated on the target. To make sure this does not impact your testing, flush the cache by copying a couple of files from one directory to another and then deleting them.

To fully evaluate failover, you need to simulate a failure. To do this, power off the source. Watch as the status changes to Failover condition met.

When a failover condition is met, you will want to start failover. You can actually start failover without a failover condition, as long as protection is enabled. For example, you may want to force a failover when upgrading to a better source server.

Note:

If you are testing failover and your source is a domain controller, do not let the domain controller communicate with any other production domain controllers after failover. Otherwise, when the original source domain controller is brought online after the test, it may create a USN rollback scenario if the test domain controller was allowed to communicate with other production domain controllers.

1. To begin failover, click Failover.
2. If Double-Take Availability determines there is a possibility that the data on the target is incomplete, you will be warned before failover begins. If you proceed with failover, the state of the source will be unknown until failover is complete. The best case scenario would be a missing data file, while the worst case scenario would be missing system state data that causes the server to be unusable or unbootable. For this evaluation, select Use live data and click OK.

3. Monitor the failover percentage as shown in the Protection Status. At the end of failover, the target will be rebooted automatically. After the reboot, the target will no longer exist, since it will become the source.

Note:

Because the Windows product activation is dependent on hardware, you may need to reactivate your Windows registration after failover. Follow the on-screen prompts to complete the reactivation.

After your target has failed over and becomes your source, you can stay with that configuration long term. However, in some instances, it may be necessary or desired to go back to using the original hardware after you have failed over.