Replicator 7.4 - Disaster Recovery Best Practices

Comprehensive synchronization on the DR Site

You can do comprehensive synchronization periodically, weekly or monthly based on your needs. This ensures that the disaster recovery site has all content, structure, and permissions from your main site, failover to the Disaster recovery site.

1.When an outage occurs, whether planned or unplanned, redirect users to the DR site (http://corporate-dr).

·Users can continue operating seamlessly, as they will have access to all of the same content that was available on the main site.

2.Turn on outgoing emails from your DR farm.

·Do so by filling out the SMTP server field for your Outgoing email settings on your DR SharePoint farm. This will allow you to get emails triggered by alerts on your DR farm.

3.Reconfigure Replicator to perform one way replication from DR site to main site with outbound processing paused.

·Replicator on the DR site will now capture changes to the now live DR site, but will pause replication, queuing up the changes for when the main site is ready to come back online.

Recovery

1.When the main server is ready to come back on line, reconfigure replicator on the main server to accept one way replication from the DR site.  And un-pause Replicator on the DR server.

·This will allow the changes that were captured on the DR site, during the time period that users were redirected to the DR site, to be queued over to the main site.

2.Alternatively, perform a site collection backup from the DR site to the main site using the Replicator site collection backup PowerShell command.

·This will re-synchronize the main site with any changes made during the redirection time period.

3.Once all content from the DR site is updated on the main site, reconfigure Replicator back to initial one way replication from main to DR.

·This will bring your environment back to its original state, where users can continue working on the main site.

4.Turn off outgoing emails from the DR farm.

·Do so by clearing the SMTP server field in the Outgoing mail settings for the DR site. As stated previously, this will prevent notification emails from being sent out about alerts, creating duplicate emails.

5.Redirect users back to the main site (http://corporate).

·Users can now continue using the main site, and all the changes have been synchronized, allowing for flawless continuity of operations.