To initiate a test recovery, click on the recovery plan in SRM and click Test.
Site Recovery Manager currently offers two point-in-time options for test failover: use the latest, or create a new one. The default behavior is to create a new point-in-time and then execute the test recovery. This is enabled or disabled by selecting or deselecting the Replicate recent change to recovery site check box.
Select or de-select this and click Next then Finish.
This will create a new replication point-in-time in the target protection group on the target FlashArray. Note it will use the default naming scheme for the protection group snapshot name.
This operation (called syncReplicationGroup) is issued to the target FlashArray. The target FlashArray then reaches out to the source FlashArray to initiate a new synchronization. If the replication link is down this operation will fail-either enable the replication link or deselect Replicate recent changes.
The step "Create writable storage snapshot" will perform the following steps:
- Create a new protection group on the target site. This will have a prefix of r- with the original name of the source protection group and a short identifier as a suffix. If the protection has been created for a previous test recovery, a new protection group will not be re-created and the existing one will be re-used. The only exception is if the protection group that was previously created has an unrelated volume already in it. In this case, VASA will create a new protection group on the target FlashArray. The existing one will be updated to match the source protection group protection policies, though it is important to note that snapshot and replication will be put into the disabled state
- Create volume groups. For each recovery VM, there will be a new volume group created. It will follow standard FlashArray vVol volume group conventions. The name is NOT guaranteed to be exactly the same as the volume group on the source
- Create new volumes for use as vVols. These will also follow standard naming conventions and will be placed in the appropriate new volume groups
The the volumes, volume groups, and protection groups may be renamed as needed between the test recovery start and stop.
Do not destroy the protection group until after successfully completing the SRM cleanup operation. While deleting the test recovery protection group will not cause the test or cleanup to fail, it will orphan the vVol-related volumes and volume groups created during the test and manual cleanup of those objects will be required and will cause subsequent test recoveries to fail.
An example test recovery protection group.
An example test recovery volume group.
The next step is for VMware to prepare the vVol file mappings. During a recovery, each new vVol has a new UUID. Each VM has a config vVol that stores all of the virtual machine files-like the VMX file and VMDK descriptor files. Since the replication is byte-for-byte, the files on the config vVol still point to the UUIDs of the previous vVols on the source site. Once the test recovery process completes on the FlashArray, the FlashArray VASA provider returns a mapping of the original vVol UUIDs to the new vVol UUIDs as well as the paths to their VMX files on the new config vVols.
vCenter then takes those mappings and updates the files on the each config vVol. This enables the power-on of the virtual machine to be able to identify and find the correct new volumes after recovery.
This file update process appears as a vCenter task called Datastore.updateVVolVirtualMachineFiles.label. This process currently takes the bulk of the time for the test recovery process and Everpure engineering is currently working with VMware engineering to improve the speed of this process. Users may note that the process is significantly faster with the actual recovery process--this is due to the fact that the ESXi improvement identified to accelerate this operation did not make release for the test recovery--only the recovery.
The test recovery process then finally registers and powers-on the virtual machines as dictated by the recovery plan.
When the test has been verified, end the test recovery by clicking Cleanup.
Click Next and then Finish the initiate the cleanup.
The test recovery cleanup operation will:
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The protection group created during test recovery will NOT be destroyed and will remain. It can be safely destroyed and eradicated manually if preferred. This protection group will be re-used for additional test recoveries if no configuration changes occur to the original source protection group