Replicator 7.4 - Disaster Recovery Best Practices

Replication Engine is Not Available with Multiple Replicator Servers

If you have multiple WFEs running as replication engines, then if one of these goes down, the other replication engine continues to process inbound and outbound packages.

Configuring Replicator for Disaster Recovery

There is more than one way to configure Metalogix Replicator for disaster recovery scenarios. This document describes the basic procedures to prepare one of these configurations. Specifically, we will create a separate and isolated web application for disaster recover (DR), configure one-way replication to the DR web application, and then synchronize it with our primary SharePoint web application. In this example http://corporate is the main web application, and http://corporate-dr is the disaster recovery web application to which the user will be redirected in the event of a disaster.

Initial Configuration

1.Install Metalogix Replicator on both the main and DR servers.

2.Configure Replicator to perform one way replication from http://corporate to http://corporate-dr.

·With one way replication, only changes that occur on the main site will be replicated over to the DR site. Any changes made to the DR site will not be replicated over to the main site.  

3.Enable replication of SharePoint user alerts using Replicator enable alerts PowerShell administration command.

·Replicator does not replicate user alerts by default; this feature must be enabled for DR scenarios.

4.Turn off outgoing emails on the DR SharePoint farm by clearing the Outbound SMTP server field in the DR farm's SharePoint Outgoing E-Mail settings.

·Clearing the SMTP server field for the Outgoing E-Mail settings will disable the DR SharePoint farm from sending outgoing emails triggered by alerts thus avoiding duplicate notifications.

5.Perform initial site collection synchronization using the Replicator site collection backup PowerShell command.

·The Replicator site collection backup PowerShell command uses the SharePoint site collection backup feature to create a backup which is then packaged up and replicated to the target where the backup is then restored so that the content on the main site and DR sites are now the same. This does not, however, allow for domain remapping, user remapping,

6.Now Replicator will catch the changes made on the main SharePoint site and apply them to the DR site as they occur.

On-going Maintenance

·Run Replication Reports regularly. This will insure that you have validated and synchronized the content that is available on the DR site (http://corporate-dr).

·Perform site collection backups regularly using the Replicator site collection backup PowerShell command.