In this article, I aim to shed light on the various components and terminologies associated with OCI Full Stack DR. If you're curious to learn about OCI Full Stack DR and how to kickstart your journey with it, I recommend reading this article. Here, we will delve deeper into understanding its core aspects, from DR Protection Groups to DR Plan Execution.
- DR Protection Groups: The DR protection group is the core resource type in Full Stack DR. It is a consistency group created to represent the business system or application. DR protection groups must be created and associated with the right roles. The DR Protection group's role can be primary or standby.
- Members: Members are the OCI resource types that can be added to the DR protection groups. The current list of supported members are
Compute - Virtual machine, Dedicated virtual machine host
Autonomous Database - Serverless
Database - (PaaS) - Oracle Base DB, Oracle Exadata DB on dedicated infrastructure
Volume Group
Load balancer
Network load balancer
File system
Based on your application topology, adding the necessary resource types as members to both primary and standby DR protection groups is essential.
- DR Plans: A DR plan is a resource type that can be created in paired DR protection groups. DR plan consists of a set of plan groups and steps. There are four types of DR plans
| DR Plan Type | What | Use cases |
| Switchover (Planned) | Performs a planned transition of services from the primary region to the standby region | Planned DR testing |
| Failover (Unplanned) | Performs an unplanned transition of services to the standby region | An unplanned outage to production region resources |
| Start drill | Brings up the replica of the production stack in the standby region. No impact on the production region. | DR mock testing |
| Stop drill | Terminates and reverses the roles of the resources created in the standby region by the start drill plan. | DR mock testing |
Creating, customising and executing the DR plans are possible only from the Standby DR protection group region.
- DR plan groups: A group of steps in a DR Plan. DR plan can consist of multiple plan groups depending on the plan types. Plan groups in a DR plan will get executed sequentially.There are two types of DR plan groups.
Built-in plan groups: Automatically generated by Full Stack DR when creating a DR Plan. Plan groups will be generated based on the type of members and DR plans. Examples: Launch compute instance, switchover database, switchover volume groups.
User-defined plan groups: Plan groups or steps created by the user. You can use either a script or OCI function in user-defined plan groups.
Plan groups can be reordered as per the application requirements. We don't recommend to reorder the built-in plan groups.
- DR plan steps: A single indivisible execution unit in a DR Plan. Each plan step must belong to a plan group. All plan steps in a plan group will be executed in parallel.
- DR plan Prechecks – Prechecks are a predetermined set of checks associated with a DR Plan. Prechecks help to validate the DR readiness. When you create a DR plan by default, it will have a built-in prechecks plan group and steps.
You have the option to execute DR plan prechecks whenever it you want to validate the DR plan, successful prechecks will provide confidence to DR operators and ensure DR readiness.
- DR Plan Execution: DR Plan execution represents an execution of a DR plan. All the plan groups will be executed sequentially as per the order in the DR plan.
Once the plan is executed successfully, roles of the DR protection group will be swapped automatically.
In conclusion, OCI Full Stack DR offers a comprehensive solution for disaster recovery. With its flexibility to customize and execute DR plans from the Standby DR protection group region, it provides businesses the confidence in their ability to recover from disasters. The feature to add necessary resources as members based on application topology makes it adaptable to various business requirements. Moreover, the ability to perform DR readiness checks gives an additional layer of assurance. Thus, understanding and leveraging these features of OCI Full Stack DR can significantly enhance your disaster recovery strategy.
Additional resources
Here are some additional resources to help you get started with Full Stack Disaster Recovery: