Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > Dell PowerStore: VMware Site Recovery Manager Best Practices > Recovery plan testing and running
Testing the recovery plan is not disruptive to the storage replications, production volumes, and VMs because the test plan uses thin clone volumes from replicated snapshots at the recovery site. When testing a recovery plan, any tests, changes, or updates can be performed on the recovered VMs because they are discarded when the test recovery plan cleanup occurs. While the test plan is running, production VMs and replication continue to run without interruption.
To test a disaster recovery plan, right-click the recovery plan, and click Test, as shown in Figure 15.
When testing or running recovery plans, SRM does not have integrated mechanisms to determine whether the replicated volumes are fully synchronized before the storage is prepared for recovery. In other words, data may be actively replicating to the secondary site which could influence the outcome of the recovery. As a best practice, check Replicate recent changes to recovery site when running a test plan, as shown in Figure 16. This action ensures that all data is successfully replicated to the secondary site.
Note: The Replicate recent changes feature results in a longer running plan. The extra time is used to synchronize the volumes between sites. During a disaster-recovery cutover, the Replicate recent changes to recovery site option may or may not be available. For planned migrations using SRM, this step is required to proceed.
When choosing to run a planned migration or disaster recovery plan (as opposed to running a test), keep in mind this procedure is disruptive. It results in VMs being powered off at the primary site, replication mirrors being broken, and VMs being recovered at the secondary site.
Note: Before running a planned migration plan, run a test recovery of the plan.
Confirmation of recovery process. When the process is started, virtual machines will start to failover.
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