Disaster Recovery Testing

[tobymartinez]

I'm curious as to how others out there are doing disaster recovery testing? We were given the initiative of running our entire phone system (CUCM 8.6, UCXN 8.6, and UCCX 8.5) out of our DR location for a week.

We currently have two hosts at our main location running the CUCM Publisher and a CUCM Subscriber.  We also have a host that runs a UCXN Publisher for Unity and a UCCX Publisher for our call center.

At our DR location we have one host that runs another CUCM Subscriber, the UCXN Subscriber, and the UCCX Subscriber.

My initial thought was to just turn off all of the servers at our main location and run off of the subscribers at our DR location.  We are connected with a 300MB MOE.

Upon doing this, I realized that no changes could be made/saved in Call Manager and UCCX and that the CAR database was not available for our 911 reporting software.  So, we turned the Pubishers back on for CUCM and UCCX.  Unity worked fine off just the DR server.

I know in a real disaster where we lost our servers at our main location, the correct procedure is to rebuild the servers you lost at your main location if possible, or at your DR location if the main location was completely lost.

Another question I have is this; Is it possible to just make a clone of the Publishers through VMWare onto the DR Host and just fire them up?  I realize I might need to re-license because I believe when you make a clone, it gets a different MAC address.  It just seems that would be much easier than rebuilding them from scratch.

Has anyone ever tried this?  How do you do your DR testing?

[Aman Soi]

Hi,

The best would be to restore Pub at  main site instead of building standby Pub at DR site.

the reasons which I can find are:

a. you need to have same IP address for standby Pub at DR site, how u ensure that ?

b. look into DBReplication  

c. ensure regular backups into standby Pub since changes would be happening in working Pub.

regds,

aman

[George Thomas]

Usually customers put their Publishers at the DR location if that location is a Co-Lo and usually its less susceptible to natural causes. You are correct that if you loose the publisher, you wont be able to make changes.

You should be able to switch off the publisher and copy the VMDK folder over to the DR location and boot it up there and change IP addresses to get it to work. You wont be able to do it live since the database doesnt support quiescing yet.

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