When you run a recovery plan, VMware Live Site Recovery migrates all virtual machines in the recovery plan to the recovery site. VMware Live Site Recovery attempts to shut down the corresponding virtual machines on the protected site.

Caution: A recovery plan makes significant alterations in the configurations of the protected and recovery sites, and stops replication. Do not run any recovery plan that you have not tested. Reversing these changes might cost significant time and effort and can result in prolonged service downtime.

Prerequisites

  • To use forced recovery, you must first enable this function. You enable forced recovery by enabling the recovery.forceRecovery setting as described in Change Recovery Settings.
  • Ensure that you have configured full inventory mappings. If you have only configured temporary placeholder inventory mappings and you run a planned migration with the Enable vMotion of eligible VMs option, planned migration fails, even though both sites are running.
  • To use the Enable vMotion of eligible VMs option with planned migration, enable vMotion on the virtual machines. For instructions about enabling vMotion on virtual machines, see Enable vSphere vMotion for Planned Migration.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client, click Site Recovery > Open Site Recovery.
  2. On the Live Site Recovery home tab, select a site pair, and click View Details.
  3. Click the Recovery Plans tab, right-click a recovery plan, and click Run.
  4. Review the information in the confirmation prompt, and select I understand that this process will permanently alter the virtual machines and infrastructure of both the protected and recovery datacenters.
  5. Select the type of recovery to run.
    Option Description
    Planned Migration Recovers virtual machines to the recovery site when both sites are running. If errors occur on the protected site during a planned migration, the planned migration operation fails. If your array supports stretched storage, select the Enable vMotion of eligible VMs check box.
    Disaster Recovery Recovers virtual machines to the recovery site if the protected site experiences a problem. If errors occur on the protected site during a disaster recovery, the disaster recovery continues and does not fail.
  6. (Optional) Select the Forced Recovery - recovery site operations only check box.
    This option is available if you enabled the forced recovery function and you selected Disaster Recovery.
  7. Click Next.
  8. Review the recovery information and click Finish.
  9. To monitor the progress of the individual steps, click the recovery plan and click the Recovery Steps tab.

Results

The Recent Tasks panel reports the progress of the overall plan.