Asynchronous Disaster Recovery

In an asynchronous disaster recovery setup, you can replicate your applications and their data between two Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters. A separate Portworx Enterprise cluster runs on each Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster.

The following diagram shows an asynchronous DR setup involving two clusters that are geographically apart:

• Application data and supported Kubernetes resources are asynchronously replicated from a source to a destination cluster, which means there is a delay between data changes occurring on the source cluster and their replication to the destination cluster.
• Incremental changes from Kubernetes or OpenShift applications and Portworx data are continuously sent to the destination cluster.
• If the source cluster becomes unavailable, you can activate the applications in the destination cluster.

Supported platforms

Asynchronous DR is supported on all Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms. The following platform-specific capabilities apply:

• OpenShift Container Platform (OCP): Supports KubeVirt VMs with PX RWX block volumes
• SUSE Virtualization: Requires Stork 26.2.0 or later and Portworx Enterprise 3.5.2 or later

important

• Cluster-wide operators are not migrated during a DR migration unless they are installed in the same namespace as the applications you want to migrate.
  • For OpenShift, the operator installation defaults to the openshift-operators namespace.
  • For Kubernetes, ensure operators are installed in the same namespace as your applications. As a result, after migration, you will not be able to scale up or down your applications on the destination cluster using storkctl.
• Disaster recovery is not supported for FlashArray Direct Access and FlashBlade Direct Access volumes. Do not configure migration schedules for namespaces containing these volumes.
• In an asynchronous disaster recovery setup, if a MigrationSchedule is created with a 100 MB object size, failover or failback to a cluster configured with a 10 MB object size fails. Portworx by Everpure recommends configuring both the source and destination clusters with the same object size to ensure successful MigrationSchedule and failover/failback operations.

Setting up asynchronous DR

Perform the following steps to set up asynchronous DR:

📄 Prerequisites

Prerequisites for Async DR migration.

📄 Prepare your Portworx cluster

Prepare your Portworx cluster for asynchronous DR.

📄 Generate and apply a cluster pair spec

How to pair your clusters.

📄 Schedule a migration

How to set up asynchronous schedules.

📄 Failover an application

How to failover an application from one Kubernetes cluster to another.

📄 Failback an application

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