Is Your IBM i HA/DR Actually Tested – Or Just Installed?

August 25, 2025 Ash Giddings

When it comes to high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) on IBM i, one question instantly separates the prepared from the at-risk: When was the last time you tested a full role swap?

It’s surprising how often IT managers and system administrators mention that HA/DR measures are in place, yet then admit that their solutions haven’t been tested in months, sometimes even years. In some cases, the DR systems were implemented but never validated at all.

According to Gartner, despite the mission-critical nature of disaster recovery, fewer than half of businesses have tested their DR plans within the past 12 months.

Unfortunately, when disaster strikes, “installed” doesn’t mean “swap-ready.”

Replication software has become a checkbox item for many IBM i shops, especially in industries with compliance requirements. Once installed, there’s often a collective sigh of relief. Job done. Right? Not quite.

Replication may appear to be functioning, but behind the scenes, things can silently go wrong:

New objects might be missing from replication.
User profiles and authorities may not be kept in sync.
Role swap scripts may be outdated, untested, or incomplete.
Replication might be paused without alerting the team.

In one real-world example, an organization discovered during a role swap that their backup server had invalid keys for critical applications due to an earlier hardware change. In another case, although the initial role swap was successful, differences in communication configurations between the backup and production environments caused replication delays and resulted in a missed window for the scheduled swap back.

In the modern world, testing is not optional and yet many IBM i shops avoid full role swap testing for possibly understandable reasons:

Lack of confidence: “What if it goes wrong?”
Skill gaps: “Our senior admin retired and no one else knows how to do it.”
Fear of downtime: “We can’t afford disruption to production.”
Complexity of the tools: “Our software is so convoluted, it’s risky to touch.”

Unfortunately, those are the very reasons why you must test. If the process is too complex, manual, or undocumented to test – it’s certainly too complex to rely on in a real emergency, when it really matters.

Not all replication solutions make testing easy with some products requiring:

Complex, manual scripting to perform even basic swap tasks.
IPLs, network reconfiguration, or intervention from third parties.
Hours of planning and long windows for both simulation and live testing.
In-depth local or application knowledge.

As a result, swap testing is often postponed to “sometime next quarter” or “a later date” – times that often never arrive. That’s where Maxava takes a very different approach.

Why Maxava Makes Role Swapping Easier

Maxava HA was designed from the ground up to support fast, flexible, and non-disruptive testing. We believe role swap testing should be part of your regular IT processes, and not an annual heart-stopping event.

Here’s what sets Maxava apart:

Simulated Role Swaps can be done in minutes, and without affecting production.
Full Role Swaps can be executed with, or without, the aid of automated command scripting, speeding up and simplifying the process.
Clear Reporting lets you know what succeeded, what failed, and what needs attention.
Granular Control makes it easy to tailor swap procedures to your environment.
Monitoring and Alerting ensures you’re notified of issues before they become critical.

In short, you can test more often, with less effort, and with more confidence. And that matters because nothing uncovers weaknesses like a rehearsal.

Maxava Ready To Role Swap Audit

Even with the right tools in place, many organizations still need help to build a resilient HA/DR posture. That’s why we created the Maxava ”Ready to Role Swap Audit”, a key service provided by Maxava’s service team designed to certify that you are in-sync and ready to role swap.

With Maxava Ready to Role Swap Audit, you can:

Help Mitigate Downtime Risks:Proactive assessment helps prevent unexpected failures and delays during critical failover events.
Identify and Resolve Gaps:If issues are found, receive a detailed list of exceptions that could prevent a successful role swap.
Choose Flexible Resolution Options:Fix identified issues internally or engage Maxava experts for remediation services.
Receive Expert Validation:Ensure your HA/DR environment is role swap-ready with certification to prove it.

Testing isn’t just good practice, it’s increasingly expected. Regulators and auditors are demanding evidence of DR readiness: tested plans, documented procedures, recovery objectives, and successful test records. In some industries a lack of testing can lead to compliance failures or even regulatory fines. Executives are also asking better questions: “How fast can we be back online?” and “Have we proven that?”

The Five Signs Your HA/DR Isn’t Really Ready

Read the next five bullets carefully and assess your company honestly:

Your last role swap test was more than six months ago.
Only one person knows how to perform the swap.
You don’t have clear success/failure reporting from previous tests.
Your runbook is incomplete, outdated, or doesn’t exist.
You’ve changed systems, applications, or configurations without updating your HA/DR setup or plan.

If any of those sound familiar, now is the time to act.

By combining proven tools like Maxava HA with expertise from Maxava services team, you can transform your HA/DR from a checkbox to a real, rehearsed, and repeatable capability.

Ash Giddings is a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2024.

This content is sponsored by Maxava.

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