A recovery plan should be tested for its readiness to make sure that it would work as expected in the event of a real disaster. Most organizations periodically review and update their recovery runbook to make sure that they have an optimized and working plan for a recovery. The same process can be applied here to periodically test the recovery plans created.
With Site Recovery Manager, the testing of a recovery plan can be automated. It is important to understand the workflow involved in testing a Recovery Plan before we delve into the details of what really happens in the background.
The testing of a Recovery Plan is done in a manner that doesn't affect the current operations, which include replication schedules, the actual replicas, or the protected VMs. In this section of the chapter, we will learn how this is achieved.
The following figure shows an overview of the steps involved during the testing of a recovery plan:
