Using scheduled replication in a cluster

You should run standard replication on a regular basis. The number of times per day you run standard replication depends on how important it is for you to keep all replicas synchronized. In most cases, once or twice per day is sufficient. If it is absolutely critical to keeps data synchronized at all times, you may want to replicate every hour or two.

In addition, you should replicate whenever you start the server to be sure that all databases are up-to-date. You can create a Program document in the Domino® Directory to accomplish this.

Note: You should use standard replication in a cluster to be sure that all databases are up-to-date. This is particularly important when you restart a cluster server after it stopped running.

There are many reasons to use scheduled replication in a cluster:

  • To replicate changes that may be lost when a server in a cluster fails

    Because cluster replication events are stored in memory only, these events can be lost when a server fails before replicating the events. No data is lost, but the cluster replication events that were pending won't be replicated until you run standard Domino® replication.

  • To replicate databases for which you have disabled cluster replication

    You may have databases that you want to replicate but not every time they are updated. You can disable cluster replication for these specific databases.

    Tip: To see whether cluster replication is disabled for a database, view information in the Cluster Database Directory. Databases with the letter X in the first column have cluster replication disabled. You can also check this by looking in the Cluster Replication field in the document for each database in the Cluster Database Directory.
  • To replicate based on selective replication formulas

    The Cluster Replicator leaves the processing of replication formulas to the standard replicator. Before using replication formulas in a cluster, you should be aware of how replication works in a cluster.

  • To replicate replicas that are on the same server

    The Cluster Replicator pushes changes to other servers that contain replicas but does not update other replicas on its own server.

    Note: If there are multiple replicas on a server, the Cluster Manager uses failover by path to select the replica for a user to open during failover. If you put multiple replicas on a server, be sure that all replicas in the cluster that have the same path use the same selective replication formulas. Otherwise, the replica to which users fail over may contain different data than they expect.