Welcome to “Feature in Five,” our byte-sized videos of industry-leading VMware product solutions, all in—you guessed—five short minutes! Last time, we video-profiled vSAN Cluster Quickstart; in this edition, we turn our attention to Site Recovery Manager non-disruptive testing.
VMware Site Recovery Manager provides reliable disaster recovery software that automates the orchestration of failover and fail-back to reduce recovery time. One of its key capabilities is built-in, completely non-disruptive testing, which allows organizations to ensure that applications will run properly during a disaster on the DR target site. Through a simple testing workflow, it verifies RTOs to reduce risk and give administrators the confidence that requirements will be met during an outage.
The recovery plan test replicates running an actual recovery plan without disrupting the protected VMs or impacting production systems. Similar to a recovery plan, the VMs are powered on during the recovery plan test, including IP customization and any scripts that run on the VMs as part of the recovery plan. However, to ensure that the production VMs aren’t altered during a test, they aren’t shut down at the protected site and are connected to a test network as opposed to a recovery network. Users should also note that during a recovery plan test, the cleanup workflow must be completed before a failover workflow of the same recovery plan can run.
VMware Site Recovery Manager non-disruptive testing provides much more than the legacy back up data to the cloud approach. For example, it generates reports that indicate how long it will take to recover from a disaster in an organization’s main datacenter, successfully preparing admins for DR audits. Users can also run testing frequently, as datacenter environments evolve with app additions, new network configurations, and other changes.
In sum, the non-disruptive testing capability in Site Recovery Manager enables organizations to ensure that RTO’s are predictable, meet audit requirements, and enhance resilience to a natural disaster or power outage. In the middle of a mishap, enterprises shouldn’t be surprised that something isn’t working as expected. Just as you would test how a plane or a car reacts in a crisis, admins similarly need to know that applications will respond properly.
To learn more about this powerful capability, take five minutes and watch here.
