Switching workloads from production VMs over to replicas at the recovery site; replica, CDP replica and storage plans do this. The plan is left in FAILOVER until it is undone, made permanent or followed by failback.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains failover in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Virtual machines
Infrastructure-as-a-service compute giving complete control of the operating system, making it a fit for lift-and-shift moves and for software relying on OS-level pieces like COM.
- OVER
Gives a T-SQL window function its window: PARTITION BY, ORDER BY and, if wanted, a ROWS or RANGE frame. Rankings and running totals can then be worked out while every row is kept.
- LSDOU
The sequence in which Group Policy is processed: the local policy first, followed by site, domain and organisational unit policies. The nearest, last-processed setting takes effect unless Enforced or Block Inheritance alters that.
- Azure AI Search replica
Additional copy of a search service's engine and indexes. Replicas spread queries for load balancing and improve availability, so adding them is the fix when queries are throttled with HTTP 503.
- CDP
Cisco Discovery Protocol lets an administrator see which port on a physical switch each host uplink is cabled to. vSphere supports it on distributed and standard switches alike, while LLDP requires a distributed switch.
- General-purpose v1
The older storage account kind (
Storage), which lacks access tiers, Archive and premium file shares and retires on 13 October 2026. Converting to ZRS requires first upgrading to GPv2, a one-way change. - failback
Moving workloads home from replicas, either onto the original VMs (updated to match the replicas' latest state) or onto VMs somewhere new. Being provisional, it ends with a commit or a roll-back to FAILOVER.
Related terms
- Admission control
A vSphere HA safeguard that reserves spare capacity for failover. Anything that would eat into that reserve, like powering on or migrating in a VM or increasing a reservation, is blocked.
- Azure Key Vault
Azure service holding secrets, keys and certificates. If the region has a paired region in the same geography, contents replicate to it, and during a best-effort failover initiated by Microsoft the vault can only be read.
- Business Critical
Azure SQL vCore tier offering the lowest latency by running Always On replicas on local SSD, plus zone-redundant failover that loses no data; serverless isn't offered.
- Check Networks
A plan step that keeps pinging a recovered machine and its network adapters until replies are steady or time runs out. It is used during failover, failback and DataLab testing.
- clean room
A recovery design: backups get copied into immutable storage somewhere remote. If production's backup server is lost, Orchestrator turns to its embedded one and recovers (by restore or failover) from that copy.
- Cluster set
Lets VMs move across multiple failover clusters grouped behind one namespace and management point.
- DHCPv6
The IPv6 version of DHCP, which either supplies options alone (stateless) or leases addresses too (stateful). DHCP failover cannot protect DHCPv6 scopes.
- Distributed network name
A SQL Server listener option on Azure VMs. Unlike a virtual network name (VNN) it works without any Azure Load Balancer and completes failover faster.