How to test volume replication is working?

Hello everyone,

We are currently running 2 devices, a primary SAN and our backup SAN. On setup our consultant created a volume replication task on our primary SAN so that our 6 volumes are mirrored on our backup SAN.
I can see that traffic is flying down our bonded connection setup for this event and everything is in a 'consistent' state, but I am wondering how best to test we can actually access this backup in case of emergency?

Because the volumes on the backup SAN are mirrored there is no direct access to them, so I am unable to present them to my VM Hosts and check them out. As I understand I need to change the state from mirrored to destination, but this seems risky. Also, the mirrored volumes do not have the same SCSI ID's as the primary SAN so I assume I will need to do some more discovery in VMware to see these? It might be easier if they were the same?

Another alternative is to create a snapshot of one of these volumes and assign the snapshot to a new target, then present that to my VM host and see if I can access the VM's? I've never done snap-shotting on open-e though....

Any other suggestions to access this data and confirm that it is working and I can actually access the VM's on my backup would be greatly appreciated, otherwise I may as well delete the task and use the space reclaimed to store backup files? Not very sophisticated I know, but atleast that is something I can easily manage!

Thanks in advance

Stuart

Is the system only replicating? Or, is it actually a iSCSI fail over set up?
To be in proper fail over configuration, the iSCSI IDs need to match. Once properly configured, you can do a manual fail over and use the destination volumes.
http://documents.open-e.com/Open-E_D..._broadcast.pdf

Hello,

It will be a replicating active-active iscsci san.

So data will be replicating to the other system and we want to be able to failover from xenserver 1 to 2...

Even then we know data is available on two nodes, but for DR purposes we want a full backup available on a seperate server so if san1 and 2 is dead we are able to restore.

We looked at software like phd virtual but it is not certified for xenserver 6.1 ans costs money...