Does the Recovery Plan run automatically?

[i3uln]

Hello

I want to propose Recovery Orchestrator to a customer.

The customer wants automated DR.
For example, is there a feature to create Recovery Plan for VMware VM, Physical Server and continuously ping, heartbeat the VMware VM, Physical Server and if there is no communication or the server is down, automatically execute the Recovery Plan ?

[Alec King]

Hello,
VRO does not have any built-in automated plan execution. It can be a risky approach.

For example, you are watching ping or heartbeat, and you get an error. But the server you are watching is not down, this is just a temporary network problem. And in such a situation, you do not want a recovery plan to automatically start - it can be a disruptive process, it will lock backup files while it starts a restore, it will start restoring VMs and starting them on your DR location - and since a real recovery has been triggered (not a test) then these restored VMs will come up in production network, and conflict with the real VM (which is already back online after the short network issue was fixed)

However it is of course possible to trigger a recovery plan in VRO using a monitoring tool. VRO has a REST API which allows full remote control of plans (start recovery, halt, resume and so on). If you do have a monitoring tool which is fully trusted to report a real production failure, then you can trigger a script that will start a plan without any human intervention.

I will say that most customers do end up requiring human approval before starting a recovery plan. The real value of VRO is in the plan, which you already prepared and tested, which will perform all the pre-recovery checks, run the required steps, confirm everything is working, and produce a detailed report on completion. That's the automation which will really save time in a DR situation.