In earlier posts, we have gone through with the Installation and Configuration of Vmware Site Recovery Manager. We explored both version 8.1 as well as 6.5.

We are no on final stage of our planning. SRM is ready for your environment. You can now plan Disaster Recovery Test to check the functionality. Here we are going to perform the same. We have the recovery plan configured according to our requirement, now let’s initiate the test drill. Remember that when you test a recovery plan, SRM uses the test network to test the VMs and keep Recovered Virtual machines in a bubble network. During test drill, your production Virtual machines will remain powered on and there is no impact on Production environment. Testing a Recovery Plan creates a snapshot on the recovery site of all the disk files of the virtual machines in the plan.

Let’s move to the Step by Step Guide to Perform a Test Drill: –

• Login to Site Recovery Manager Console.
• Go to Recovery Plans and Click on Recovery Plan you want to initiate. You can group your virtual machines in Protection Groups and later can add those protection groups to the recovery group. Now you will have choice which Virtual Machines you want to test.

• Go to Monitor tab and Click on Green Run Icon.

• Select Replicate Recent changes to recovery site. Click Next.

• Test is ready to start. Click on Finish.

• You can check the status from here. There are multiple steps which it will perform. Make sure that it give a success message to all steps. In case you get any failure message, you need to verify and rectify that issue again.

• You can also go to Objects tab under Recovery Plan and Check the overall status of testing.

• Recovery still in progress but moved to different stage now. Keep an eye on this.

This is all about Test Recovery or you can say Test Drill of Disaster Recovery. Next we are moving to Cleanup Activity.

Take a look in below topics, explore and learn Site Recovery Manager: –

• Learn SRM – Part 1 – Introduction of VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.1
  

• Learn SRM – Part 2 – Understand VMware Site Recovery Manager Licensing

• Learn SRM – Part 3 – Understand Minimum Requirement for SRM in your Home Lab

• Learn SRM – Part 4 – Prepare for Replicated Storage in you Home Lab (Ignore this step in Real Environment. You need to interact with Storage team for all these tasks in real environment)

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.1 – Deploy HP VSA in Both Site

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.2 -Configure HP VSA Appliance Networking in both Site

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.3 -Install HP CMC Management Console

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.4 -Add Appliance in HP CMC

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.5 -Create Management Group in HP VSA

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.6 -Create Cluster and Volumes in HP VSA

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.7 -Find and Add ISCSI Initiator in ESXi Host

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.8 -Assign Volume to ESXi Host

  • Learn SRM – Part 4.9 -Scheduling Array Based Replication

• Learn SRM – Part 5 – Install VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.1 (SRM)

• Learn SRM – Part 6 – Install SRA (Storage Replication Adapter)

• Learn SRM – Part 7 – Configure Site Pairing for both Protected and Recovery Site
  

• Learn SRM – Part 8 – Configure SRM Array Manager Pairing

• Learn SRM – Part 9 – Configure Resource Mapping in VMware SRM
  

• Learn SRM – Part 10 – Create Placeholder Datastore in VMware SRM
  

• Learn SRM – Part 11 – Configure Protected Groups in VMware SRM
  

• Learn SRM – Part 12 – Configure Recovery Plans in VMware SRM
  

• Learn SRM – Part 13 – Perform Test Drill using VMware SRM
  

• Learn SRM – Part 14 – Perform Cleanup Activity in VMware SRM
  

• Learn SRM – Part 15 – Perform Cleanup Activity in VMware SRM