Recovery testing

Test recovery brings up protected workloads on the recovery site from their last consistent replicated copy — without disrupting production or ongoing replication. Run it from the recovery site: Configure → Protection Plans → (plan) → Actions → Test Recovery.

Run a test recovery

1. Select virtual machines

   Choose the VMs to test-recover and pick the recovery source:

   • Latest — uses the most recent replicated copy.
   • Point In Time — uses an available checkpoint; select a common checkpoint for all VMs or per-VM checkpoints from the dropdown.

   If pre/post scripts are configured, provide guest credentials (username/password, or upload a credentials file). Credentials are used only for the workflow and never stored. For VMware targets with static IP assignment, credentials are mandatory.

2. Test recovery configuration

   Adjust compute/instance type, storage, and network so the drill stays non-intrusive — typically pointing at sandbox networks. If you use static IPs here, confirm they are free. On Azure targets you can change Disk Access and the disk access key under General.

3. Tools and scripts

   Three options control what is installed and executed in the recovered guests:

   • Install System Agents — installs platform tools per target and guest OS:

     Recovery platform	Windows	Linux
     AWS	EC2Launch2 and SSM Agent	Not supported
     GCP	google-compute-engine, oslogin, osconfig agents	Not supported
     Azure	Azure VM agent	Not supported
     VMware	VMware Tools	OpenVMTools

     Required when assigning static IPs on VMware targets. Installing agents in Windows guests needs administrator credentials.

   • Install Cloud Packages — installs the AWS Cloud SDK (Windows) or Google Cloud SDK on the recovered guests.

   • Run Protection Plan Level Scripts — executes plan-level recovery scripts. Skip this in drills if those scripts make infrastructure changes (DNS updates and similar) you don't want from a test.

4. Summary

   Review and click Finish. Test recovery jobs start for the selected VMs; monitor them under Jobs → Recovery, which shows the current step of each job.

Validate the recovered VMs

Check Jobs → Recovery for completion; successful jobs show an IP address per recovered instance.

• Windows — download the RDP file next to the IP address and connect over RDP.
• Linux — copy the IP and connect over SSH.

The info icon on a recovery job shows the recovery configuration used for that run.

Clean up after testing

Related docs

• DR drill

• Failover

• Jobs