Synchronous disaster recovery in airgapped bare metal

To deploy Synchronous DR (also known as Metro DR) setup, you need to install a single stretched Portworx cluster across two clusters. A single Portworx clusters spans across an on-premise environment with a maximum latency of 10 ms.

The following diagram shows a synchronous DR setup involving two clusters in the same metropolitan area network:

This document explains how to install a stretched Portworx cluster and achieve synchronous DR. It will demonstrate how to failover and failback applications between two clusters.

caution

• Cluster-wide operators are not migrated as part of a DR migration if it is not installed in the same namespace as the applications you want to migrate. As a result, after migration, you will not be able to scale up or down your applications on the destination cluster using storkctl.
• Synchronous DR is supported only on Vanilla Kubernetes with vSphere cloud drive configurations.
• In a Synchronous DR setup,
  • The maximum supported replication factor is 2.
  • The sharedv4 service volumes are not supported in the Portworx cluster.
  • KubeVirt VMs are not supported.

Perform the following steps to set up synchronous DR:

📄 Prerequisites

Prerequisites for Synchronous DR migration.

📄 Prepare your cluster

Find out how to install a single stretched Portworx cluster across multiple Kubernetes clusters.

📄 Setup a witness node

Find out how to install a witness node.

📄 Generate and apply a cluster pair spec

Find out how to pair your clusters.

📄 Schedule a migration

Find out how to synchronize your clusters by scheduling periodic migrations between them.

📄 Failover an application

Find out how to failover an application from one Kubernetes cluster to another.

📄 Failback an application

Find out how to failback an application from the backup Kubernetes cluster to the original one.