Choosing a Recovery Point when leveraging ASR Recovery Plans

Question

Hello, I've created my first Recovery Plan for the purpose of initiating a real and test failover event for servers contained within the same Replication Group. When testing I noticed right away that the Recovery Point drop down seems to be missing some options. See below screenshot.

Compared with the options below when initiating a DR failover for a single VM outside of a Recovery Plan.

So given the timestamps are completely removed when using a Recovery Plan, how are you to tell what point in time you are using when initiating failover?

Regards,
Adam Tyler

Answer 1

Hello @AdamTyler-3590 Thank you for posting your question on the Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to answer any questions you may have!

When using a Recovery Plan in Azure Site Recovery, the Recovery Point drop-down list may not show all the options that are available when initiating a failover for a single virtual machine. This is because the Recovery Plan uses a different mechanism for selecting the recovery point.

When you initiate a failover for a single virtual machine, you can select the recovery point from the Recovery Point drop-down list, which shows the available recovery points based on the replication settings for that virtual machine. However, when you initiate a failover using a Recovery Plan, the recovery point is selected automatically based on the settings in the Recovery Plan.

By default, the Recovery Plan uses the latest recovery point for each virtual machine in the replication group. However, you can customize the recovery point selection by configuring the Recovery Plan to use a specific recovery point or a range of recovery points. To do this, you can use the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) setting in the Recovery Plan.

The RPO setting allows you to specify the maximum age of the recovery point that can be used for failover. For example, if you set the RPO to 1 hour, the Recovery Plan will use the latest recovery point that is no more than 1 hour old. If you set the RPO to 24 hours, the Recovery Plan will use the latest recovery point that is no more than 24 hours old.

To view the recovery point that was used for a failover initiated using a Recovery Plan, you can check the failover history in the Azure Site Recovery portal. The failover history shows the start time of the failover, the virtual machines that were failed over, and the recovery point that was used for each virtual machine.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any further questions.

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