Part 8 – Recovery Plans

Now we reach the stage of creating a recovery plan.

• Click ‘Recovery Plans’ in the Site Recovery Manager portal
• Click ‘Create Recovery Plan’
• You are now asked to select the site where the VMs will be recovered, select the desired site, then click ‘Next’
• Now you should tick the ‘Protection Groups’ to be included in this recovery plan to select them, then click ‘Next’
• You are now presented with the option to select the networks to be used when performing tests on the recovery plan, you can either select real networks or leave it as ‘Auto’ for SRM to automatically create a new isolated network environment… as a rule of thumb we would normally leave these as ‘Auto’, then click ‘Next’.
• Enter a name and description for the plan and then click ‘Next’
• Click ‘Finish’ to create the recovery plan
• Selecting the ‘Recovery Plan’ will show the status of the recovery plan.  At the top of the screen you will also see two options, one to ‘Test’ and one for ‘Recovery’.  Clicking the ‘Test’ button will executre a Test DR failover, placing the VMs in an isolated test network.  Recovery will execute a real failover and place all of the VMs on the relevant network in the destination.
• We should now review some of the settings in the ‘Recovery Plan’.  Click the ‘Virtual Machines’ tab.  By default all virtual machines are placed in the ‘Power On Priority 3 VM’s’ group.  You can give a virtual machine higher or lower priority simply by clicking on the virtual machine and changing the priority.  Higher priority VMs will start before lower priority VMs.
• There may be a requirement to change the IP configuration depending on the location where the virtual machines are located.  The IP Address can therefore be configured as required.
• Double-click on the virtual machine, select the ‘IP Settings’, then tick the box ‘Customize IP settings during recovery’.  You can then click ‘Configure Recovery’ to enter the new IP Address information for the virtual machine
• If you update the IP Address configuration, you should also update the DNS entries on the ‘DNS’ tab
• You should also configure the ‘Protection’ site settings (the source location) as this will be required to be able to perform a failback without having to configure all of the settings at that time.
• Click the ‘Recovery Steps’ tab to see the steps involved with the recovery plan
• With a recovery plan in place, you can log onto the destination location and see the virtual machines listed with an SRM logo to show that they are a placeholder for the VM

This ends Part 8 of our instructions… please click here to continue to Part 9 or here to return to the 10-part Site Recovery Manager menu.