Performing a failover with Elastic Disaster Recovery - AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
Launching recovery instances

Performing a failover with Elastic Disaster Recovery

A failover is the redirection of traffic from a primary system to a secondary system. It's a network operation that's performed outside of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery helps you perform a failover by launching recovery instances in AWS. Once the Recovery instances are launched, you will need to redirect the traffic from your primary systems to the launched recovery instances.

Note

These instructions also apply to the cross-Region or cross-AZ failover process.

Launching recovery instances

Ready for launch indicators

Prior to launching a Recovery instance, ensure that your source servers are ready for testing by looking for the following indicators on the Source Servers page:

Table row showing a server with "Ready" status, "Healthy" replication, and successful recovery 2 days ago.

  1. Under the Ready for recovery column, the server should show Ready

  2. Under the Data replication status column, the server should show the Healthy status.

  3. Under the Last recovery result column, there should be an indication of a successful Drill instance launch sometime in the past. The column should state Successful and show when the last successful launch occurred. This column may be empty if a significant amount of time passed since your last drill instance launch.

Launching recovery instances

To launch a recovery instance for a single source server or multiple source servers, go to the Source servers page and check the box to the left of each server for which you want to launch a recovery instance.

Source server list showing one server ready for recovery with healthy data replication status.

Open the Initiate recovery job menu and select Initiate recovery.

Dropdown menu options showing "Initiate drill" and "Initiate recovery" selections.

Select the Point in time snapshot from which to launch the recovery instance for the selected source server. You can either select the Use most recent data option to use the latest snapshot available or select an earlier specific Point-in-time snapshot. You may opt to select an earlier snapshot in case you wish to return to a specific server configuration before a disaster occurred. After you have selected the Point in Time snapshot, choose Initiate recovery.

Points in time selection interface showing recent data option and two specific timestamps.

Learn more about Point in Time snapshots.

The AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Console will indicate Recovery job is creating drill instance for X source servers when the drill has started.

Click View job details on the dialog to view the specific Job for the test launch in the Recovery job history tab.

Successful recovery instance launch indicators

You can tell that the recovery instance launch started successfully through several indicators on the Source servers page.

  1. The Last recovery result column will show the status of the recovery launch and the time of the launch. A successful recovery instance launch will show the Successful status. A launch that is still in progress will show the Pending status.

    Table showing recovery status for two instances, one pending and one successful.

  2. The launched recovery instance will appear on the Recovery instances page. Learn more about the Recovery instances page.

  3. You can now redirect traffic from your primary systems to the launched recovery instances.

Note

Launch of a new recovery instance from the same source server will clean up all the previous recovery instances, regardless if they have been disconnected and deleted from DRS