GTM, DNS and site failover

Hi, I'm a complete novice with F5 products and looking at the design of a solution for my client so please bear with me.

 

 

The scenario is this, we have a primary and dr site. Both are running in a hot configuration, although the application at DR cant be hot as for replication the vendor is using mssql log shipping and databases will be in recovery mode. So its Hot infrastructure but warm applcation.

 

 

The client does not want automated failover, they want management to make the call and the application cant handle it anyway.

 

 

So it has been suggested to use gtm to handle the failover and its DNS service (since we cant use network routing as there is no layer 2 link between the 2 sites)

 

 

Looking through the guides I was thinking we might want to configure it as follows..

 

2 pools, one for each site with the local virtual servers in each pool

 

Load balancing method - Return to DNS

 

 

1 wide ip configured with only the active pool in the list, again load balancing method - return to dns

 

 

In the event of a disaster we would reconfigure DNS using zonerunner and also modify the wideip to contain the site for the DR pool so that all traffic from the internet is sent to the DR site virtual servers

 

 

Have I understood this correctly or not?

 

 

I cant help but think there might be a simpler way of achieving this using just the DNS service and pools? or are we trying to do something the GTM wasnt really designed for?

 

 

thanks for your help

 

 

D