Test Failback

1 February 2024

As a best practice, regularly test and update your DR plan to ensure that it is effective in the event of an actual disaster. Testing involves checking if the DR plan works as expected and updating the DR plan with any changes that may have occurred since the last failback. During a Test Failback, the application is failed back to the primary site. Once the testing is complete, you can tear down resources created during the Test Failback.

To test a failback:

In SiteContinuity, navigate to DR Plans.
In the Disaster Recovery Plans page, choose a DR Plan for testing the failback. A DR Plan must be in the Failback Ready state to test a Test Failback.
Click the Actions menu (⋮) of the DR plan, and select Test Failback. The Readiness Test page displays the target DR site and the target Cohesity cluster:
From the Resource Profile drop-down, select a Resource Profile.
(Optional) If you want to fail back the VMs and their disks from the source to the target datastore when the VMs are running, select Perform Storage vMotion.
For recovery, the latest snapshot is used by default. Verify the displayed snapshots or click Edit to choose a different snapshot, and click Apply.
Click Test Failback.

On the Disaster Recovery Plans page, the Checks column displays a beaker icon that indicates the result of the most recent Test Failover or Test Failback performed on the DR plan. When you click Test Failback, the Test Failback starts and shows a progress symbol on the icon (), signifying that the Test Failback is underway.

Validate Test Failback

To validate test failback:

Log in to the primary vCenter.
Ensure that the VM instances come up in the specified order as defined in your DR plan.
Verify that the allocated resources and network configurations for each VM are correct.
If you have set up an isolated network, test the accessibility of the VMs.
Test the functionality of your critical applications to confirm that they are working as expected in the primary environment.

By following these steps, you can ensure that your primary environment is functioning properly and that all VMs and applications are operational.

Next Steps

If the Test Failback was successful and the beaker icon displays a green tick (), you can click the Actions menu (⋮) corresponding to the DR plan and perform the following tasks:

If the Test Failback fails, the beaker icon shows an error symbol (). Click the icon to see the error message. To explore possible causes and resolve the error, see the Troubleshooting section.

Disasterrecovery Documentation