I am trying to solve an issue for a backup scenario. We have a routed fiber network between our sites. All our servers are at our main site and we have a set of small backup servers at a 911 site. They are duplicates of the main site servers. These servers will utilize the same IP addresses (and subnet) when they are booted up in a disaster. To keep them in synch with the production servers, they are on all the time but their "duplicated" IP addresses are not active on the same network.
Since they wanted them on the same "physical" layer two vlan and accessible all the time we created an extended vlan between the two sites using a spare fiber set. Note that these two sites have a lot of vlans and the sites normally route between each other so this "extended vlan" is basically a layer two vlan between the sites with a layer 3 HSRP set up for the IP. So the .1 router is normally the main site router. The backup 911 standby router needs only to become the primary if the main site is totally down and the routed connections between the sites and the extended vlan is severed (rare).
The issue is this...in normal operations all the sites use the main site to get to this server vlan since it is the best path for this vlan. However the 911 site has this vlan directly attached to the 6509 along with other user vlans. Therefore 911 sees this IP subnet as directly connected and the preferred path instead of using the routed path to the main site to access this extended physical lan. No matter what bandwodth setttings or IP ospf costs values I use, the 911 site always wants to use the directly connected path and that is the issue.....because during normal operations when everything is up the gateway address of .1 lies at the main site and not the 911 site. Any ideas? I know it sounds cluggy.
Other than manually shutting down the layer int for the vlan at 911 and unshutting it during a full blown disaster I have yet to fiqure out a quick easy way to fix this....without adding an additional router at 911 and placing the standby routing for this extended vlan on that router at 911 but that is making things just to complex and adding hardware.
Thanks
