How a Failover Recovery Plan Runs

You can run failover recovery plan immediately after a real life disaster event, or run it as a test failover before a real disaster occurs.

You can run a failover recovery plan in the following ways:

• Failover. Run a recovery plan failover following a disaster event when the source site is no longer available. The failover operation orchestrates on the destination site based on previously replicated snapshots. When failing over to a recovery SDDC, VMs that belong to the protection groups defined in your recovery plan are recovered to the vCenter on the recovery SDDC.

• Test failover. A test failover operation is similar to regular failover operation, but runs in the context of its own test environment. By default, a test failover stops on the first failure, whereas a regular failover continues to run, even after failures. You can override all default behaviors by custom options prior to starting the failover operation. With a test failover, you have the option to clean up the test plan. For more information, see Test Recovery.

We highly recommmend that you use separate Tier-1 gateways to use for failover to production network environments and to testing environments. For more information, see add a custom Tier-1 gateway to the recovery SDDC.