Do you test your systems recovery?

Do you remember the amount of investment spent in time and money when you decided to implement your recovery solution?

Are you confident that your recovery systems will work should the worst happen?

To maintain the resilience of your LifeKeeper solution, we have devised a 5-Point Checklist:

• When did you last complete a system test?

LifeKeeper systems need to be tested on a regular basis. It is recommended that you perform a failover test every month, but as a minimum, tests should be performed every 3 months. This is to make sure that when recovery on the back up server is invoked, it will run smoothly.

• How often do you monitor the status of the mirror?

If the mirroring stops, it means that your data is no longer replicated. Therefore, it is critical to regularly monitor the status of your mirror. You can never really do this too often, so make it a regular practice to look at your mirror status at least daily.

• Have you set up email notification for your servers?

Being notified by email or text every time a failover or switchover happens is extremely easy to set up. It is an easy way to be notified every time you need to pay some attention to your LifeKeeper servers.

• Do you check your event logs regularly?

For the general health and housekeeping of the server, check event logs daily. Al events such as hardware failures, LifeKeeper information, quotas, application specific actions, logons are logged in your event logs. Failover can sometimes be prevented by detecting errors early enough and taking corrective action.

• Do you verify all configuration changes? Eg passwords

If you perform changes to configurations such as passwords, settings, files, you will also need to ensure that these changes won’t affect the functionality of LifeKeeper. To do this you need to check your event logs. It is also advisable to test changes by performing a switchover. Of course, it is best to do this outside of normal hours, or in periods of low usage.

If you need assistance assessing the resilience of your high availability solution, Open Minds are able to perform a Health Check, either remotely or on-site to ensure that your LifeKeeper servers are running smoothly, ready, should the worst happen.

For more details about the Health Check please read the Open Minds Health Check document or contact us on sales@openminds.co.uk or 0121 313 3943.