6.1

Creating, Testing, and Running
Site Recovery Manager Recovery
Plans 6
After you configure Site Recovery Manager at the protected and recovery sites, you can create, test, and run
a recovery plan.
A recovery plan is like an automated run book. It controls every step of the recovery process, including the
order in which Site Recovery Manager powers on and powers off virtual machines, the network addresses
that recovered virtual machines use, and so on. Recovery plans are flexible and customizable.
A recovery plan includes one or more protection groups. You can include a protection group in more than
one recovery plan. For example, you can create one recovery plan to handle a planned migration of services
from the protected site to the recovery site, and another plan to handle an unplanned event such as a power
failure or natural disaster. In this example, having these different recovery plans referencing one protection
group allows you to decide how to perform recovery.
You can run only one recovery plan at a time to recover a particular protection group. If you simultaneously
test or run multiple recovery plans that specify the same protection group, only one recovery plan can
operate on the protection group. Other running recovery plans that specify the same protection group
report warnings for that protection group and the virtual machines it contains. The warnings explain that
the virtual machines were recovered, but do not report other protection groups that the other recovery plans
cover.
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Testing a Recovery Plan on page 66
When you create or modify a recovery plan, test it before you try to use it for planned migration or for
disaster recovery.
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Performing a Planned Migration or Disaster Recovery By Running a Recovery Plan on page 67
You can run a recovery plan under planned circumstances to migrate virtual machines from the
protected site to the recovery site. You can also run a recovery plan under unplanned circumstances if
the protected site suffers an unforeseen event that might result in data loss.
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Differences Between Testing and Running a Recovery Plan on page 69
Testing a recovery plan has no lasting effects on either the protected site or the recovery site, but
running a recovery plan has significant effects on both sites.
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Performing Test Recovery of Virtual Machines Across Multiple Hosts on the Recovery Site on
page 70
You can create recovery plans that recover virtual machines across multiple recovery site hosts in a
quarantined test network.
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Create, Test, and Run a Recovery Plan on page 70
You perform several sets of tasks to create, test, and run a recovery plan.
VMware, Inc.
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