Overview of Disaster Recovery Plans

A Disaster Recovery (DR) plan is an automated DR workflow (a DR runbook) created by Full Stack DR to perform disaster recovery for all the resources in the primary DR protection group.

The DR plan consists of a sequence of steps that define how all the application stack components in a primary DR protection group in one region or availability domain (AD) are transitioned to its peer standby DR protection group in another region or AD.

These are some of the key features of DR plans:

1. Full Stack DR automatically creates DR plans after performing an intelligent analysis (introspection) of the contents of the primary and standby DR protection groups.
2. A DR plan consists of a sequence of plan groups, and each of these plan groups consists of plan steps.
3. When creating a DR plan, the optimal sequence of plan groups and steps within those groups are automatically determined by Full Stack DR.
4. When a DR plan is executed, plan groups in the DR plan execute sequentially, and plan steps in each group execute in parallel.
5. Plan groups and steps generated by Full Stack DR are called Built-in, whereas plan groups and steps added by you are called User-defined.
6. DR plans are highly flexible and you can customize them. For more details about customizing a DR plan, refer Modify a Disaster Recovery Plan
   • You can add your own user-defined groups and steps to a DR plan after it is created by Full Stack DR.
   • You can reorder the sequence of Built-in and User-defined groups within a DR plan.
   • You can customize the execution behavior of Built-in and User-defined groups and steps.
7. Full Stack DR can create DR plans only for a DR protection group that has a standby role. To create DR plans at a primary DR protection group, you must first transition the primary DR protection group to a standby role by executing a DR plan to perform a DR transition.
8. A pair of associated DR protection groups can have multiple DR plans created for performing DR transitions between the two DR protection groups.
9. DR plans can exist at both protection groups in an associated pair, but only DR plans at the standby DR protection group are in an Active state and available for modification or execution. DR plans at the primary DR protection group are held in an Inactive state and cannot be modified or executed until that DR protection group assumes a standby role.
10. After you perform a DR transition and the roles of the DR protection groups in the pair are reversed, DR plans at the new standby DR protection group become Active and the DR plans at the new primary DR protection group become Inactive.

A typical sample workflow for creating and executing DR plans works as follows:

1. Create an associated pair of primary and standby DR protection groups and add application stack members and other resources to the DR protection groups. You can name the primary DR protection group as DRPG-IAD, and the standby DR protection as DRPG-PHX.
2. Create one or more DR plans at DRPG-PHX because it is the current standby. Customize these DR plans if required.
3. Execute any one of these DR plans at DRPG-PHX to perform a DR transition of application stack from DRPG-IAD to DRPG-PHX. After the DR plan execution is complete, DRPG-IAD is now the new standby and DRPG-PHX is the new primary.
4. Create another set of DR plans at DRPG-IAD because it now has a standby role. Customize these DR plans if required.
5. Execute any one of these plans at DRPG-IAD to perform a reverse DR transition from DRPG-PHX back to DRPG-IAD.
6. Now that there are DR plans created and stored at both DRPG-IAD and DRPG-PHX. Use the appropriate plans stored at the current standby DR protection group to perform DR transitions back and forth between these two DR protection groups at any time.