System Manager 11.70.1 - Role change between volumes in a mirrored pair

You can change the role between volumes in a mirrored pair. You can do this by demoting the primary volume to the secondary role or promoting the secondary volume to the primary role.

Review the following information about the role change operation:

When a primary volume is demoted to the secondary role, the secondary volume in that mirrored pair is promoted to the primary role and vice versa.
When the primary volume is demoted to the secondary role, hosts that have been assigned to that volume no longer have write access to it.
When the secondary volume is promoted to the primary role, any hosts that are accessing that volume are now able to write to it.
If the local storage array is unable to communicate with the remote storage array, you can force the role change on the local storage array.

Force role change

You can force a role change between volumes in a mirrored pair when a communication problem between the local storage array and the remote storage array is preventing the promotion of the secondary volume or the demotion of the primary volume.

You can force the volume on the secondary side to transition to the primary role. Then the recovery host can access the newly promoted volume, and business operations can continue.

Note: When the remote storage array has recovered and any communication problems have been resolved, a Synchronous Mirroring - Primary Volume Conflict condition occurs. The recovery steps include resynchronizing the volumes. Use the Recovery Guru to recover from this error.

When is a forced promotion allowed and not allowed?

Forced promotion of a volume in a mirrored pair is not allowed under the following conditions:

Any of the volumes in a mirrored pair are in the process of an initial synchronization.
The mirrored pair is in the Failed, Role-Change-Pending, or Role-Change-In-Progress states or if any of the associated reserved capacity volumes are failed.

Role change in-progress state

If two storage arrays in a mirroring configuration become disconnected, and the primary volume of a mirrored pair is force demoted to a secondary role, and the secondary volume of a mirrored pair is force promoted to a primary role, then when communication is restored, the volumes on both storage arrays are placed in the Role-Change-In-Progress state.

The system will complete the role change process by transferring the change logs, re-synchronizing, setting the mirrored pair state back to a normal operating state, and continuing with synchronizations.