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RobWindham
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-31-2020 12:59 PM

DR Test Strategy Question

My boss has indicated that he wants to run a full DR test. He has also indicated that while he wants all production servers brought up in the recovery site, none of the changes made during testing will need to be replicated back to the original site. I don't have a ton of experience with SRM. So my questions is, rather than going through the potential headaches of a planned migration to the recovery site and a fail back to the original protected site, can my DR test be accomplished with just a test of my recovery plan? Here is what I am thinking

- Execute a test of the recovery plan

- At the protected site, manually power off all protected VMs

- At the recovery site, manually configure the settings on the protected VMs and place them in the appropriate DR network

- Do our testing

- When testing is complete, move all the protected VMs back to the isolated network created during the test

- Run a cleanup on the recovery plan

- Power everything back on in the original protected site

At this point, is it like nothing ever happened? Am I off base or over-simplifying things? We are running SRM version 8.2 with Vsphere replication. Vcenter is on version 6.7 at both sites and they are in linked mode.The hosts in the protected site are on ESXi version 6.7, and the hosts at the recovery site are 6.0.

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ashilkrishnan
VMware Employee
VMware Employee
‎07-31-2020 09:58 PM

Hi Rob,

Running a test recovery is a better option. You can run a test and a cleanup. Planned migration would involve- Recovery from A > B --> Re-protect B > A

When you run a test, copy of replica disks are created --> These copy VM files are registered and powered on. By default they are powered on in a test bubble network to avoid any conflicts with production VMs.

Network can be manually changed, however if feasible you can also configure isolated network port groups at recovery site for testing purpose. This way you can have the productions VMs continue to run unaffected. Test Networks and Data Center Networks 

Once the testing is done, you can run the cleanup

Hope that helps

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