What is a Failover? Understanding Acronis Disaster Recovery

Overview

A failover is a critical emergency response procedure. Specifically, it transfers your live workloads from a failed primary server to a standby recovery server. Within your Nexcess environment, Acronis Disaster Recovery facilitates this process. Consequently, your business remains online even if your primary infrastructure experiences a catastrophic outage.

Instead of waiting hours to restore backups, you switch to a ready-made replica. Therefore, you minimize costly downtime and protect your revenue.

How a Failover Works

When disaster strikes, Acronis streamlines the recovery process. Here is exactly what happens when you initiate a failover:

  1. You Declare a Disaster: First, you determine that your primary server is unrecoverable in an acceptable timeframe.

Failover Initiation

Remember, Nexcess will never initiate a failover on your behalf. You are solely responsible for declaring a disaster and executing this procedure.

  1. You Trigger the Procedure: Next, you initiate the failover from your Acronis console.
  2. The Recovery Server Boots: Immediately, Acronis powers on your pre-configured standby virtual machine within the Acronis cloud site.
  3. Traffic is Rerouted: Finally, you redirect network traffic via DNS to this new cloud-based server. Your applications will resume serving users when propagation completes.

Test vs. Production Failovers

Acronis offers two distinct types of failovers. Each serves a very specific operational purpose:

  • Test Failover: You use this to validate your disaster recovery plan. Specifically, it boots your recovery server inside a safely isolated network sandbox. Therefore, you can test your disaster response without disrupting your live production traffic.
  • Production Failover: You use this during a genuine outage. It promotes your standby recovery server to act as your live production environment. Furthermore, Acronis automatically begins backing up this newly active cloud server.

Crucial Considerations

Before executing a failover, you must understand the following operational mechanics:

  • Strict 7-Day Timeline: A production failover is strictly a temporary emergency state. Consequently, you have a strict maximum of seven days to complete a failback.
  • The Failback Procedure: You must execute a failback to return your live workloads to your repaired primary Nexcess server.
  • Test Teardowns: You must manually tear down test failovers after validation. Simply powering off the test server does not properly end the test.