SRM (Site Recovery Manager) is a disaster recovery and business continuity solution offered by VMware. It enables organizations to automate the failover and failback of virtual machines between primary and secondary sites, providing protection for critical workloads in the event of a disaster or planned maintenance.

When you perform a test failover in SRM, you are essentially simulating a disaster recovery scenario without affecting the production environment. It allows you to validate the readiness of your disaster recovery plans, ensure that recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) can be met, and verify that your failover procedures work as expected. During a test failover, no actual failover occurs, and the VMs continue running in the primary site.

Use Cases for SRM Test Failover:

1. Disaster Recovery Validation: Performing test failovers allows you to validate your disaster recovery plan and ensure that your virtual machines can be successfully recovered at the secondary site.
2. Application and Data Integrity: Testing failovers helps ensure that your applications and data will remain consistent and usable after a failover event.
3. Risk-Free Testing: Since test failovers do not impact production systems, they provide a safe environment for testing without the risk of causing downtime or data loss.
4. DR Plan Verification: Test failovers help verify the accuracy of your recovery plan and identify any gaps or issues that may need to be addressed.
5. Staff Training and Familiarization: Test failovers offer an opportunity for staff to familiarize themselves with the disaster recovery process and gain experience in handling failover scenarios.

Example of Performing a Test Failover with SRM: Let’s consider a scenario where you have a critical virtual machine running in your primary site, and you have set up SRM for disaster recovery to a secondary site.

1. Configure SRM: Set up SRM in both the primary and secondary sites, establish the connection between them, and create a recovery plan that includes the virtual machine you want to protect.
2. Initiate Test Failover: In the SRM interface, navigate to the recovery plan that includes the virtual machine and initiate a test failover for that specific virtual machine.
3. Recovery Verification: During the test failover, SRM will create a snapshot of the virtual machine, replicate it to the secondary site, and power on the virtual machine at the secondary site. You can then verify that the virtual machine is running correctly at the secondary site and that all applications and services are functioning as expected.
4. Test Completion: Once you have verified the successful operation of the virtual machine at the secondary site, you can initiate a test cleanup to remove the test failover environment.

It’s important to note that a test failover does not commit any changes to the production environment. After the test is complete, the virtual machine continues running in the primary site as usual, and the test environment at the secondary site is deleted.

Before performing a test failover, ensure you have a clear understanding of the process and its potential impacts on your environment. It’s advisable to schedule test failovers during maintenance windows or other low-impact periods to avoid any potential disruptions to production systems. Regularly conducting test failovers can help ensure the effectiveness of your disaster recovery strategy and provide peace of mind that your critical workloads are protected and recoverable in case of a disaster.

VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) does not have a native PowerShell cmdlet specifically designed for initiating a test failover. However, you can use PowerShell together with the SRM API to perform a test failover programmatically.

Here’s an overview of the steps you can take to perform a test failover using PowerShell and the SRM API:

Install VMware PowerCLI: VMware PowerCLI is a PowerShell module that provides cmdlets for managing VMware products, including SRM. If you haven’t already, install the VMware PowerCLI module on the machine where you want to initiate the test failover.

Connect to the SRM Server: Use the Connect-SrmServer cmdlet from VMware PowerCLI to connect to your SRM Server:

Connect-SrmServer -Server <SRM-Server-Address> -User <Username> -Password <Password>

Retrieve the Recovery Plan: Use the Get-SrmRecoveryPlan cmdlet to retrieve the recovery plan you want to test:

$recoveryPlan = Get-SrmRecoveryPlan -Name "Your-Recovery-Plan-Name"

Initiate Test Failover: To start the test failover, you can use the Start-SrmRecoveryPlan cmdlet and pass the -Test parameter:

Start-SrmRecoveryPlan -RecoveryPlan $recoveryPlan -Test

Monitor Test Failover Progress: You can monitor the progress of the test failover by checking the status of the recovery plan:

Get-SrmRecoveryPlanStatus -RecoveryPlan $recoveryPlan

Clean Up Test Failover (Optional): Once the test failover is completed, you can use the Stop-SrmRecoveryPlan cmdlet to stop the test and clean up the test failover environment:

Stop-SrmRecoveryPlan -RecoveryPlan $recoveryPlan

Please note that the above example assumes you have already set up and configured Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with recovery plans and the necessary infrastructure for replication between the primary and secondary sites. Additionally, it’s essential to understand the implications and potential impact of performing a test failover on your environment before executing the PowerShell script.

Since software and APIs might have changed or evolved since my last update, it’s a good idea to check the official VMware PowerCLI documentation and resources for the latest cmdlet syntax and available options for working with Site Recovery Manager.