Disaster recovery fire drill - Ensuring the disaster recovery readiness of a service group

Last published : Jun 19, 2026
The disaster recovery (DR) fire drill feature is a DR solution in InfoScale Operations Manager, which verifies the ability of a globally configured service group to fail over on a remote cluster, or that of a stretched service group to come online on the remote site in the same campus cluster. A DR fire drill is a zero-downtime test that mimics the configuration, application data, and failover behavior of critical service groups. A successful DR fire drill indicates that it is highly likely for a critical service group to fail over as intended or as configured on to a remote cluster, when it is needed.
The DR fire drill feature lets you do the following:
  • Verify that replication for an application works correctly.
  • Verify that a DR service group can be brought online successfully.
The objective of the DR fire drill is to bring the fire drill service group online on the remote cluster. The result of this operation verifies the ability of the similarly configured service group to fail over and come online on the remote cluster. When the DR fire drill group comes online, it uses a snapshot of the application data, which is a point-in-time copy of the replicated production data for the application. Fire drill service groups do not interact with outside clients or with other instances of resources. Therefore, they can come online safely even when the service group is online.
Note: The effectiveness of the replication of a service group varies for each replication agent pack that you use. For more information on the limitations of the agent packs, refer to the respective user documentation for the agent pack.
Using InfoScale Operations Manager, you can run the disaster recovery (DR) fire drill for the specific service groups that you choose in InfoScale Operations Manager. To perform this operation you must select the service groups that belong to the same cluster.
To perform this operation, you must have any of the following privileges:
  • Operator privilege on the service groups for which you want to run the DR fire drill
  • Operator privilege on the parent cluster of the service groups for which you run the DR fire drill
    Note: To perform a DR fire drill on the service groups, you must create a fire drill service group on the remote cluster. The configuration of the fire drill service group is similar to the configuration of the original service group. For more information, refer to theCluster Server Administrator 's Guide.
The following procedure describes the configuration of DR fire drill for a service group named Oracle_SG.
To run the disaster recovery fire drill for Oracle_SG service group
  1. In the Management Server console, go to the Availability perspective and selectManage in the left pane.
  2. Expand the Organization or Uncategorized Clusters to locate the cluster.
  3. Expand the cluster and then the Service groups node to locate theOracle_SG service group.
  4. Right-click on the Oracle_SG service group and selectFire Drill>Run DR Fire Drill.
  5. In the Fire Drill wizard panel, click Next.
  6. In the Schedule wizard panel, do the following:
    • Select Schedule for later.
    • Enter a name for the fire drill schedule and specify the frequency of the fire drill run.
    • Click Next.
  7. In the Summary panel, verify your selections for configuring fire drill for Oracle_SG. Click Finish.
  8. In the Result panel, verify that the DR fire drill for Oracle_SG has been configured successfully.
More Information
Example: Improving the availability and the disaster recovery readiness of a service group through fire drills