Difference between Failver vs Test Failover

Question

I have created VM in North Central US on Azure Cloud. After launched, I configured disaster recovery for VM from North Central US to South Central US. I just started Test Failover for testing. Its working fine. Then i cleaned-up the test Failover. Afterthat i have seen one more option as Failover as below image.

1. whats the difference between Failover and Test Failover?
2. Should we start the Failover for each time? or its should get automatically trigger? For ex: we have configure disaster recover for region outages. After we enabled disaster recovery option, if north region completely down or outages, then Is it should automatically start one copy of this VM on South central US region? or Should we start failover by manually?

I'm not clear on this. Can any one please clear my doubts? As well i would like to do same thing for SQL serverless database on Azure. So please advice me for both.

Answer 1

Hi @Lakshmi Narayanan

Thank you for posting in Q & A forum.

1. whats the difference between Failover and Test Failover?
Test Failover- You run a test failover to validate your replication and disaster recovery strategy, without any data loss or downtime. A test failover doesn't impact ongoing replication, or your production environment. You can run a test failover on a specific virtual machine (VM), or on a recovery plan containing multiple VMs.
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Failover- The failover that creates and brings up an Azure VM using the selected recovery point.
Commit: After failover you verify the VM in Azure:
You can then commit the failover to the selected recovery point, or select a different point for the commit.
After committing the failover, the recovery point can't be changed.
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2. Should we start the Failover for each time? or its should get automatically trigger? For ex: we have configure disaster recover for region outages. After we enabled disaster recovery option, if north region completely down or outages, then Is it should automatically start one copy of this VM on South central US region? or Should we start failover by manually?
No, Data is replicated to Azure storage in your subscription. When you perform a test failover (DR drill) or an actual failover, Site Recovery automatically creates virtual machines in your subscription.

Azure SQL Database serverless
Serverless is a compute tier for single databases in Azure SQL Database that automatically scales compute based on workload demand and bills for the amount of compute used per second. The serverless compute tier also automatically pauses databases during inactive periods when only storage is billed and automatically resumes databases when activity returns.
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