Oracle Managed Disaster Recovery in Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) Gen3 Release (October 2024)

Introduction:

In the latest Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) Gen3 release, version 24.10 (October 2024), Oracle introduces the Oracle Managed Disaster Recovery solution. This feature is designed to provide robust protection for your critical applications and data, ensuring business continuity in the event of a disaster. Please note that Oracle Managed Disaster Recovery is a paid feature

 

Simplified Disaster Recovery Management

With Oracle Managed Disaster Recovery, we no longer need to worry about managing DNS changes, load balancing, design-time data synchronization between instances, object storage buckets, and other responsibilities. All message traffic is automatically forwarded to the correct instance, and all messaging is bidirectional. This means we can fail over from one instance to another and back seamlessly. Data synchronization between the two instances occurs automatically in near real-time, minimizing data loss.

User Responsibilities

To leverage Oracle Managed Disaster Recovery, users need to follow these steps:

1. Subscribe to the Secondary Region

Ensure that we have subscribed to the secondary region where our disaster recovery instance will be hosted.

2. Install Primary and Secondary Instances

When installing an instance in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Console, select the "Enable disaster recovery" toggle. This action creates primary and secondary instances in separate, predetermined regions. Data synchronization between the two instances is automatically configured and occurs in near real-time.

3. Perform Prerequisites Prior to Failover

Review and address the following prerequisites to ensure a smooth failover process:

• If the connectivity agent is installed in an OCI Compute instance that fails, have a recovery plan in place for the connectivity agent.
• If we are using our own email tenancy, manually maintain our email notification details in both the primary and secondary instances.
• For File Server connections, use the port and hostname instead of the port and IP address.

4. Fail Over and Fail Back Between Instances in Different Regions

Oracle Managed Disaster Recovery supports two types of failover:

• Unplanned Failover: If our primary instance becomes unreachable, click "Start Failover" in the OCI Console of the secondary instance to initiate failover.
• Planned Migration: For periodic planned migrations between instances, click "Start Failover" in the OCI Console of either the primary or secondary instance to fail over to the secondary instance.

Once the original primary instance is restored, we can fail back to that instance.

5. Configure Email Notification Settings After Failover

After a failover occurs, configure the email notification settings on the Notifications page of the new primary instance to ensure you continue receiving important alerts and updates.