Changes in 1 recovery plan affect other recovery plans

[PeterDorrington]

Hi, Hoping someone out there can shed some light on this. Using Vsphere 5.5U2 with SRM 5.8 in a Flexpod environment. We have had SRM for a couple of years and have always thought it odd that we can create multiple recovery plans, say one for production DR (all VMs) and say one for testing a small selection of VMs (for perhaps just the accounts system) and if we change the priority or power state in one recovery plan (say test) it changes the priority and power state in all the other recovery plans to the same. This is a real pain if you want a DR recovery plan but your test, or specific application, recovery plans keep changing the settings for you.

I'm at VMworld 2015 and spoken to three separate techies and they've all said the same thing that I should be able to create two recovery plans with the same VMs in and the priority and power on state should be allowed to be different in each one. Ironically I testing the same scenario in an SRM hands on lab and hey presto I replicated the same thing and left the same techies scratching their heads.

Am I missing something here ? Everyone says we should be able to do what I'm trying to do but no one seems to be able to explain why we can't. Suspect I'm going to have to log a call but I'm curious to see if others are experiencing the same thing.

Cheers

Peter

[npadmani]

What you are experiencing is even documented, see following (line in bold letters)

Specify the Recovery Priority of a Virtual Machine

By default, Site Recovery Manager sets all virtual machines in a new recovery plan to recovery priority level 3. You can increase or decrease the recovery priority of a virtual machine.

If you change the priority of a virtual machine, Site Recovery Manager applies the new priority to all recovery plans that contain this virtual machine.

Site Recovery Manager starts virtual machines on the recovery site according to the priority that you set. Site Recovery Manager starts priority 1 virtual machines first, then priority 2 virtual machines second, and so on. Site Recovery Manager uses VMware Tools heartbeat to discover when a virtual machine is running on the recovery site. In this way, Site Recovery Manager can ensure that all virtual machines of a given priority are running before it starts the virtual machines of the next priority. For this reason, you must install VMware Tools on protected virtual machines.

Ref: Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Documentation Center

I guess this is because, what if you are executing multiple recovery plan concurrently, and set of VMs are part of all those.