About disaster recovery fire drills

Last published : Jun 19, 2026
The disaster recovery (DR) fire drill feature is a DR solution in InfoScale Operations Manager. The DR fire drill 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.
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.
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.
To ensure the failover, it is recommended that you disable the DR fire drill when they are not in use.
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Running the disaster recovery fire drill
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