Site Recovery Manager is a very powerful disaster recovery product which can be configured to fulfil complex failover and failback requirements but this post shows how easy it is to set up your first protected VM, Protection Group and Recovery plan and run a Planned Failover to demonstrate the fundamentals of the software. Look out for more posts in the future diving in to some of the configurable options.

Start by logging in to either the Protected or Recovery vCenter…
Select Site Recovery from the drop down Menu and Open Site Recovery

Log in to Site Recovery Manager

Create a new Replication, Protection Group and Recovery Plan

Filter for the VM that needs to be protected

Select Datastore

Choose RPO settings

Review selected configuration

Confirm Replication is complete and status to change to OK

If the site environments are not identical, you may get warnings and must configure the VM for the site it will be recovered to

Configure all of the required settings and click OK

The VM placeholder is now in the Recovery Site

To failover, go to Recovery Plans and select Run

Select if this is a planned Failover or Disaster Recovery and confirm settings

The Protected Site VM will shut down and the Recovery Site VM will power on

Failover successful