Part 10 – Recovery and Failback

The final stage of our process is to go ahead and perform a failover and failback of some virtual machines.  This should be performed using an unimportant virtual machine… please note that during the recovery and failback process, the source virtual machine will be powered off and therefore there will be a network outage to the virtual machine.

• Once you have performed a test recovery, go back to the ‘Recovery Steps’ section of the SRM portal
• Click on ‘Recovery’ at the top of the screen.  You will now see a screen similar to below:
  
• As you can see the ‘Recovery’ option has a red alert sign to show that this will impact the usage on the virtual machines.  You must tick the box to say that you understand that this will permanently alter the virtual machines and infrastructure at both locations.
• You then have to let the application understand whether this is a ‘Planned Migration’ or ‘Disaster Recovery’.  A planned migration will make sure that all of the latest changes are replicated to the destination location before cutting over, plus the task will cancel if there are errors encountered during the process… this option also requires the sites to be connected and storage replication to be functioning.
• The ‘Disaster Recovery’ option will attempt to replicate the latest changes to the virtual machines but understands that the source site may not be available and therefore will use the latest replication data available to recover the virtual machines.  This will also continue the recovery even if errors are encountered.
• In most cases we will probably be using the ‘Planned Migration’ method and therefore select this and then click ‘Next’
• You will now receive a summary screen, click ‘Start’ to begin the planned migration
• Switch back to the ‘Recovery Steps’ tab to check the progress… you can also have a ping test running to the virtual machine to see when the machine becomes available again.
• You will also notice that the source virtual machine will be turned off and the destination virtual machine will be turned on.
  
• You are now able to reverse the protection by clicking the ‘Reprotect’ button
• The reprotect process will commit the results of the recovery and change the protection in reverse.
• You will need to click the ‘I understand that this operation cannot be undone’ and then click the ‘Next’ button:
  
• You will receive the summary screen once more and clicking the ‘Start’ button will confirm the reprotect.
• Once the reprotect process is complete, you can once again perform a ‘Test’, ‘Planned Migration’ or ‘Disaster Recovery’ as performed earlier.

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