Introduction #

For VReplication streams, we must choose a tablet to serve the role of source (vstreamer) and target (vapplier) in the replication stream and this is done automatically.

To select the tablets we get a set of viable -- healthy and serving -- candidates for the source and target of the stream:

• Source: a random tablet is selected from the viable candidates of the specified types (see tablet types)
• Target: a viable primary tablet is chosen, as we need to do writes that are then replicated within the target shard

Cell considerations #

VReplication will only look for tablet pairings within the same cell. If you want to have cross-cell streams then you will need to create a CellAlias that contains the list of potential cells and specify that using the -cell flag in your VReplication workflow commands.

Tablet types #

The server side default which determines the candiate types made available for potential selection in a stream is set using the vttablet's -vreplication_tablet_type flag. The target tablet will use this when finding the viable source tablet candidates.

You can override this on the client side using your workflow command's -tablet_types flag.

In Vitess 12.0 and later you can specify an order of preference for the tablet types using the in_order: prefix in both the server and client flags. For example, -tablet_types "in_order:REPLICA,PRIMARY" would cause a replica source tablet to be used whenever possible and a primary would only be used as a fallback in the event that there are no viable replicas available at the time.