SRM recovery plans, whether they are for migration or failover, run as part of a planned workflow that attempts to properly shutdown the protection site and synchronize data with the recovery site prior to the migration or failover. This ensures that systems are properly quiesced and that all data changes have been replicated prior to starting the virtual machines at the recovery site. If, however, an error is encountered during the recovery plan execution, planned migration stops the workflow, providing an opportunity to fix the problem that caused the error before attempting to continue. If failover was used, SRM continues past the errors.
All recovery plans in SRM include an initial attempt to synchronize data between the protection and recovery sites, even during a disaster recovery scenario. During a disaster recovery event, an initial attempt is made to shut down the protection group's virtual machines and establish a final synchronization between the sites. This is designed to ensure that virtual machines are static and quiescent before running the recovery plan which minimizes data loss where possible during a disaster. If the protected site is no longer available, the recovery plan continues to run to completion even if errors are encountered. This reduces the possibility of data loss while still enabling disaster recovery to continue, balancing the requirement for virtual machine consistency with the ability to achieve aggressive recovery-point/time objectives.
The figure below shows the recovery plan execution wizard.