Run a Failback Recovery Plan

You can run a failback recovery plan to restore a protected site.

Once you start a failback plan, do not make any inventory changes on the protected site until the failback completes. You cannot edit a recovery plan once the plan has been started.

Importantly, do not power on any VMs in a plan during a failback operation. Wait until the failback completes, and then you can power on VMs in the plan.

If you need to make any protected site vCenter inventory changes, such as renaming a data center, or moving VMs to different folders or resource pools, do so before you initiate a recovery plan for failback.

Also, make sure that the plan’s compliance check succeeds before you run the plan. Running a failover when the plan compliance check is not all green will likely result in a failback failure.

Note: If you perform a failback of a VM from a high-frequency snapshot, and it fails, all retried failbacks for this VM will require a full restore (which can take longer than ususal).

Note: If a host on the target recovery site is in maintenance mode, then failback to that host will fail. Before you fail back, ensure that all hosts are available and not in maintenance mode.

Note: VMware Live Cyber Recovery ensures that Virtual Machines disk UUIDs are preserved after failback.

Procedure

1. From the left navigation, select Recovery plans.
2. Select the recovery plan you want to fail back.
3. To run a failback recovery plan, you must activate it. From the list of plans, select the failback plan and click the Activate button. If the failback plan has already been activated, then the Failback button is enabled.
4. Click the Failback button.
5. In the Compliance check page, review the compliance information, and then click Next.
6. In the Runtime settings page, under Error Handling select one of the following two options:
   • Ignore all errors. With this runtime option, the failback runs in an unattended mode to allow the plan to continue running, even when it encounters errors. The system automatically ignores all errors by default. You can still fix those errors at the end of the failback operation if the failback completes with partial success, by clicking Retry all errors.
   • Stop on every error. With this option selected, the user has two choices during failback when errors are encountered: Retry the step, after some manual intervention to amend the error. The failed substeps are retried, which can result in success or a repeated error. Or, Continue the failback after a stop. For example, if the error is not critical and the error can be fixed later. This operation skips the failures from the failed substep and continues with the failback operation.
7. In the Preview page, you can review the steps the plan will complete when the failback is initiated.
8. When you are ready to start the failback, enter FAILBACK in the confirmation box and then click Start Failback.
   If the plan is configured with the 'During failback, wait for user confirmation before powering off VMs' option selected as a recovery step, the plan will pause just prior to powering off VMs in the recovery SDDC and wait for user confirmation to continue. (For more information, see Configure Failback to Wait for User Confirmation for VM Power-off.)
   Once a user clicks Power Off VMs, the plan begins powering off VMs and recovering them to the protected site.
9. After the failback finishes, click the Commit button.
10. In the Commit failback dialog box, enter any notes about the operation, and then enter COMMIT FAILBACK in the confirmation box.
11. Click the Commit button.