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Table Of Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 VMware SRM terminology
- 3 Overview and prerequisites
- 4 Configuring array based replication
- 5 Installation and configuration of VMware SRM
- 6 SRM protection groups
- 7 Recovery plans
- 8 Testing
- 9 Recovery
- 10 Failback
- 11 Considerations for guest iSCSI connected volumes
- 12 Summary
- A Technical support and resources
28 Disaster Recovery with Dell PS Series SANs and VMware vSphere Site Recovery Manager | TR1073
8 Testing
One of the greatest attributes of SRM is the ability to non-disruptively test the recovery plan before there is a
failure. This allows administrators the ability to tune their recovery process and ensure a plan will perform as
intended in the event of an actual failover. It also allows for comprehensive auditing of the recovery plans
without affecting production virtual machines.
A test failover scenario is designed to completely eliminate any impact on the production VMs and datastore
volumes. When a test is run on the recovery site, the recovery site PS Series group is instructed by SRM by
the SRA to create a clone of the replica volumes and bring the clones online. The cloning of the replica allows
the replication of the production datastores to continue, while also still allowing exact copies of the VMs to be
made available at the recovery site. However, there needs to be sufficient free space available in the DR
group in order to create a clone and bring it online. If there is not enough free space, the clone operation will
fail and the test will fail with an error of not being able to see the datastore volumes.
Once the clone is created, SRM will send the information about the recovery ESXi hosts to the SAN group,
add to the access control list and bring the clone online. This allows SRM to rescan the storage at the ESXi
host level. The volume will re-signature as needed in order to bring that clone online as a new datastore.
SRM will then re-configure the recovery VMs to point to the new clone volumes and start powering them up in
the order specified in the recovery plan. During the testing phase, SRM will isolate the VMs based on the
testing network setting that was configured earlier. By default it will create a recovery vSwitch with no external
NIC connections. Again, this is done along with everything else to protect the production environment.
1. From the vSphere Web Client: log in to either site, click on Home and select Site Recovery from
inventories. Click Recovery Plans and select a recovery plan. This will show the recovery run book
and then execute for both testing and recovery.