Testing a Recovery Plan

When you create or modify a recovery plan, test it before you try to use it for planned migration or for disaster recovery.

By testing a recovery plan, you ensure that the virtual machines that the plan protects recover correctly to the recovery site. If you do not test recovery plans, an actual disaster recovery situation might not recover all virtual machines, resulting in data loss.

Testing a recovery plan exercises nearly every aspect of a recovery plan, although Site Recovery Manager makes several concessions to avoid disrupting ongoing operations on the protected and recovery sites. Recovery plans that suspend local virtual machines do so for tests and for actual recoveries. With this exception, running a test recovery does not disrupt replication or ongoing activities at either site.

If you use vSphere Replication, when you test a recovery plan, the virtual machine on the protected site can still synchronize with the replica virtual machine disk files on the recovery site. The vSphere Replication server creates redo logs on the virtual machine disk files on the recovery site, so that synchronization can continue normally. When you perform cleanup after running a test, the vSphere Replication server removes the redo logs from the disks on the recovery site and persists the changes accumulated in the logs to VM disks.

If you use array-based replication, when you test a recovery plan, the virtual machines on the protected site are still replicated to the replica virtual machines' disk files on the recovery site. During a test recovery, the array creates a snapshot of the volumes hosting the virtual machines' disk files on the recovery site. Array replication continues normally while the test is in progress. When you perform cleanup after running a test, the array removes the snapshots that were created earlier as part of the test recovery workflow.

You can run test recoveries as often as necessary. You can cancel a recovery plan test at any time.

Before running a failover or another test, you must successfully run a cleanup operation. See Clean up After Testing a Recovery Plan.

Permission to test a recovery plan does not include permission to run a recovery plan. Permission to run a recovery plan does not include permission to test a recovery plan. You must assign each permission separately. See Assign Site Recovery Manager Roles and Permissions.