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regnak
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Invoking a Recovery Plan without breaking replication

Hi Folks,

Quick question just to make sure I'm heading in the right direction. We've implemented SRM and the customer wants to test it. They want to avoid having to reconfigure replication and SRM to failback. I was wondering, if we used a tweaked Recovery Plan in Test mode to connect the DR VMs to the live network down there after powering down the Production VMs, would this allow us to test the recovery plan? They are happy to throw away any changes to the VMs while they are running in DR that day (weekend). In theory this would allow us to finish the Recovery Plan Test, destroy the DR VMs and power back up the Production VMs?

Would this work?

Thanks

Mike

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Michelle_Laveri
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Yep, I get you. Can't you change the "test-bubble" to be one of the real VLANs in the recovery site.

As far I understand, test-bubble is just there to protect you from accidental IP/Hostname conflicts... It's not mandatory and can be changed...

Of course if you do this - you will have to make some efforts to stop any conflicts you might have....

I think you should be able to do hard-test without the failback routine - but you will have to manual handle the storage side...of making the recovery site volumes, secondary again - and ensure replication of protected to recovery is re-established again. A hard run doesn't touch your protected site, except to power down the protected site VMs in the order according to the recovery plan.

I must say I've never tried this - can someone from VMware back me up here?

Regards

Mike Laverick

RTFM Education

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk

Author of the SRM Book: http://www.lulu.com/content/4343147

Regards
Michelle Laverick
@m_laverick
http://www.michellelaverick.com

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Michelle_Laveri
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Just to clarify somethings. When you say "test" you mean hitting the test button right, as opposed to the run button...?

The test, should allow you to run non-disruptive test without touching the replication schedule......

If you going for something a bit more "realistic"... a full run. Replication from the protection to the recovery site is stopped whilst the recovery sites volumes are made r/w and promoted to be primary volumes. I suppose there is nothing stopping you manually inverting this - resetting the primary and secondary replication in the storage layer.

Remember in a planned DR event it is a default behavior to shutdown VMs in the protected site...

Regards

Mike Laverick

RTFM Education

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk

Author of the SRM Book: http://www.lulu.com/content/4343147

Regards
Michelle Laverick
@m_laverick
http://www.michellelaverick.com
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regnak
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Thanks Mike,

Yep - the client wants to click "test" on the main recovery plan, but connect the DR VMs to the live production network rather than a test bubble. That way we can carry out a more functional test (Connect to services from XP desktops, test mailflow, internet access and WAN connectivity - specifically Dynamic Routing of the network subnet these VMs are using. We would manually power down and power up the Production VMs around this test to avoid a conflict. What we're anxious to avoid is having to carry out a Full "Run" of the recovery plan and all the failback work associated with that. The Client wants to simply discard any changes to the DR VMs in this scenario.

Hope this makes sense?!

Thanks

Mike

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Michelle_Laveri
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Yep, I get you. Can't you change the "test-bubble" to be one of the real VLANs in the recovery site.

As far I understand, test-bubble is just there to protect you from accidental IP/Hostname conflicts... It's not mandatory and can be changed...

Of course if you do this - you will have to make some efforts to stop any conflicts you might have....

I think you should be able to do hard-test without the failback routine - but you will have to manual handle the storage side...of making the recovery site volumes, secondary again - and ensure replication of protected to recovery is re-established again. A hard run doesn't touch your protected site, except to power down the protected site VMs in the order according to the recovery plan.

I must say I've never tried this - can someone from VMware back me up here?

Regards

Mike Laverick

RTFM Education

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk

Author of the SRM Book: http://www.lulu.com/content/4343147

Regards
Michelle Laverick
@m_laverick
http://www.michellelaverick.com
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regnak
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Hi Mike,

Thanks - I'll go ahead and set this up. I might play with this in a Lab over the weekend just to check before we do it for real in a few weeks. Cheers.

Mike

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