Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Types of Disaster Recovery Plans

Full Stack DR provides the ability to create the following different types of Disaster Recovery (DR) plans.

  • Start drill - A DR drill is often performed to check if the standby stack can be brought up successfully. Start drill plan generates the plan to perform the DR drill without interrupting the production environment. It creates a replica of your production stack in the standby DR protection group. This replica of the production stack is similar to the stack that is brought up in the standby DR protection group when you perform a switchover or failover.
  • Stop drill - A type of DR plan that stops the DR Drill. This removes the replica of your production stack created earlier by Start drill.
    Note

    A replica drill stack must be present in the standby DR protection group when you run the Stop drill plan.
  • Switchover (planned) – A type of DR plan that performs a planned transition of services from the primary DR protection group to the standby DR protection group. Switchover plans are used to perform an orderly transition by shutting down the application stack in the primary region and then bringing it up in the standby region. Therefore, a switchover plan requires that application stack components and other required OCI services be available in both regions. Switchover plans are typically used for the purposes of planned site maintenance, software patching, DR testing, and validation.
  • Failover (unplanned) – A type of DR plan that performs an unplanned transition of services to the standby DR protection group. Failover plans usually perform an immediate transition by bringing up the application stack in the standby region, without attempting to shutdown service in the primary region. Therefore, a failover plan only requires that OCI services be available in the standby region. Failover plans are generally used to perform DR transitions when an outage or disaster affects the primary region.

    When you run a Start drill plan:

    • The primary and standby DR protection groups transition to a DrillInProgress state.
    • When the DR protection groups are in a DrillInProgress state, if you attempt to execute a Switchover, Failover or Start Drill plan (or an associated precheck), you will get an error message indicating that this is a disallowed operation and that you must first execute a Stop Drill plan.
    • You cannot add or delete Members to/from DR protection groups when a drill is in progress.
    • Ensure to update the DR protection group pair to an Active state by executing a Stop Drill plan, before executing a switchover or failover DR plan.
    • The roles of the two DR protection groups do not change when a drill is in progress.
    • When the primary and standby DR protection groups states are DrillInProgress, you can execute only the Stop Drill plans.
    • The roles of the two DR protection groups remain as Primary and Standby. The lifecycle states change from Active to Inactive and lifecycle substate of DrillInProgress is set when a drill is started. The lifecycle states revert to Active when the drill is stopped.