Part 9 – Testing Recovery Plan

The next stage is to test our recovery plan.  You should always test the recovery plan prior to performing a recovery (unless you are in a situation where testing isn’t possible).  The testing will identify any problems that need to be rectified prior to performing a real failover.

• Under the ‘Recovery Plans’ section of the SRM portal, click the ‘Protection Groups’ tab
  
• You can now click the ‘Test’ link
• You are shown a confirmation screen that you are performing a test (notice the warning triangle)
  
• Click ‘Next’ to continue
• You will now receive a summary screen of what is going to happen, click ‘Start’ to begin the test
• You can watch the progress of the test using the ‘Recovery Steps’ tab
  
• You will also see the virtual machine become powered on at the destination location, whilst the original virtual machine is still powered on at the source location
• Everything should appear to be completed in ‘Green’ if the test has been successful.  Once you are happy that the testing has been completed successfully, click the ‘Cleanup’ link to clear down the test environment and make the machines available for full recovery again.
• Step through the wizard to perform the cleanup.

This ends Part 9 of our instructions… please click here to continue to Part 10 or here to return to the 10-part Site Recovery Manager menu.