RE: Using Replication

We've got two production pairs, one is at version 7.24.UC6, the other is at 7.24.UC8. DBMS size of the first pair is a little over 12Gb, and we are going to be upgrading them to Foundation.2000. The second pair has a size of about 4Gb, and we are moving them to 7.31.UC6A (we already have the replicating development boxes on this version). Yes, we use 'ontape' to sync the servers. We do our archives to disk, so I ftp the archive files to the secondary, do the 'ontape -p', and then start up HDR. HTH, Paul Mosser -----Original Message----- From: SongIn_Lindsey@frankel.com [mailto:SongIn_Lindsey@frankel.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2000 11:21 AM To: informix-list@iiug.org Cc: mosserp@WellsFargo.COM Subject: RE: Using Replication Thank for your information. Yes, I do mean HDR. We are currently on Informix 7.31 UC 2. What Informix version are you running? Could tell me how large are the database servers that you are replicating? Did you use Ontape to sync the data for first time? (i.e level 0 backup and restore of ontape -p command to secondary) Or did you use some other backup software (i.e Ominiback, ... etc) Thanks again, Song Lindsey mosserp@Wells Fargo.COM To: informix-list@iiug.org cc: SongIn_Lindsey@frankel.com 09/12/2000 Subject: RE: Using Replication 11:06 AM If you mean High-availability Data Replication (HDR), then, yes, we are using it. Primary and secondary servers are located several hundred miles apart, communicating over a very busy T1. DRINTERVAL is set to 30, but almost everything is replicated within a few seconds. We use asynchronous because we don't want to impact the primary -- user response time on that machine is critical. We leave DRAUTO at 0 (manual switchover), because we have been told that (1) you can get a lot of unnecessary switching if you have occasional minor network "blips", and (2) under some circumstances, it might be possible for the secondary to switch itself to primary, and yet the old primary does NOT switch to secondary, so you can have users making possibly conflicting updates to both boxes -- major nightmare! Perhaps for these reasons (I don't know for sure why), HDR in IDS.2000 does not have the DRAUTO option configurable -- it is "hard-coded" to 0 (manual). And this has not really been a problem for us. Whenever we need to do maintenance on the primary box (this is a critical 24x7 application), we've got the switchover routine down to about a minute. The most time-consuming part is *nicely* getting the user sessions off of the old primary. If it's an emergency, an "onmode -uy" does the trick quickly. :-) Then I just advance to the next logical log a couple of times (forces flush to secondary), force a checkpoint, change the primary to "standard" mode, and then bring it down. Then I switch the secondary to "standard" mode, and the users can start connecting to it now. The biggest reasons that I really like HDR are (1) very low maintenance, (2) reliable and resilient (replication almost always restarts and re-synchronizes automatically after network problems), and (3) very easy and straightforward to setup / restart. HTH, Paul Mosser Wells Fargo & Co. -----Original Message----- From: SongIn_Lindsey@frankel.com [mailto:SongIn_Lindsey@frankel.com] Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 3:04 PM To: informix-list@iiug.org Subject: Using Replication Is any one using replication in their environment? Looking for feedback. If you are, please give some experiences and details of your environmental setting that is being used in your replication environment. How is performance on the primary servers, what DRINTERVAL used, what setting for DRAUTO is being used, etc. Thank you, Send email to SongIn_Lindsey@frankel.com