Disaster Recovery Checklist: You Need A Plan To Avoid Mistakes
Here you will find out:
- why do you need a disaster recovery plan
- what is disaster recovery planning checklist
- when DiskInternals can help you
Are you ready? Let's read!
Why do you need a VMware disaster recovery plan?
A disaster recovery plan (DR) is an individually formed set of principles and specific instructions aimed at minimizing the negative consequences of disasters in enterprises and organizations. The plan clearly describes all your actions before, during, and after the accident.
Typically, a disaster recovery plan consists of:
- recovery objectives,
- recovery procedures,
- incident reports,
- response measures.
Disaster recovery checklist; what is it?
Each disaster recovery plan must also contain a disaster recovery checklist. And these are specific mandatory steps that must be followed so that the damage after the accident was invisible. Also, the Disaster Recovery Checklist can simply be viewed for reference to ensure that all the conditions for the disaster recovery plan are met. After all, only if you have all the Disaster Recovery Checklist components in place can you count on the full implementation of this recovery plan.
Disaster recovery planning checklist
Here are the must-haves on the disaster recovery checklist:
- 1. Business risk analysis: That is, at the beginning, you must identify all possible vulnerabilities of your company, objectively assess the likelihood of their occurrence, and calculate the possible impact of an emergency on your business. This will help to subsequently take effective prevention and/or mitigation measures. You can also then clearly understand what your disaster recovery plan should include.
- 2. Recovery: Time Target (RTO) and Target Value (RPO). These are the two most important concepts that allow you to set goals and objectives for implementation. For example, the RTO determines the required time to recover from a disaster. And RPO is the maximum allowable amount of possible data loss, measured over time. That is, you must decide what services are most important for the company and set a goal to preserve them. Thus, a business recovery strategy is being developed.
- 3. Assign a disaster recovery command: Disaster recovery should not be done by one person, but by a specific team. Each member of this team must have clearly defined tasks for which they are responsible. All of these should be documented and written separately to avoid controversy and misconduct during a real emergency.
- 4. Plan B: Create a disaster recovery site. You should always have a secondary DR site with sufficient hardware and software to handle your most critical workloads. In the event of a disaster, you can move your critical workloads to this created disaster recovery site. These secondary sites are not used for day-to-day operations, but you should be clear about how to perform disaster recovery operations without causing major disruption to your business. Moreover, this must be done in advance and always be in a ready position.
- 5. Remote access documents: Even if your IT infrastructure is as good as possible, there is a risk of losing data. Therefore, you need to take care to find the backup copy on a remote source of information.
- 6. Disaster recovery communication: You need to ensure that all employees have internal communication with each other during disaster and recovery.
- 7. Check for Equipment needs: You must have all the information about the equipment available, its quantity, and quality. This information will clearly show you how much hardware is required to restore the entire infrastructure, and you will also know how much hardware is enough to support critical workloads.
- 8. Stakeholders' informing: All concerned employees should be made aware of the disaster as soon as possible. For this, it is recommended to create a press release in advance and publish it promptly, so as not to waste time.
- 9. Test-drive the plan: In order to see how your plan actually works, you need to periodically test it from time to time. Indeed, the goals and objectives of the recovery plan may change, since the company does not stand still, but is constantly improving.
DiskInternals is a great solution for disaster cases
Missing, corrupted VMDK files can be easily recovered using DiskInternals VMFS Recovery.
The application is as automated as possible. As a result, the current state of the VMFS datastore, disks, and volumes are checked within a few minutes, and if there is missing VMDK files - you will find out about it. Checking the integrity of the recovered data is completely free for customers - there is a Preview for this. Then you will have time to think and make an informed decision about purchasing a data export license.
Instructions for DiskInternals VMFS Recovery:
With the application open, if necessary, first connect via SSH (skip if necessary).
Then open the drive by double-clicking with the left mouse (it can be SSH or local drive).
After the scan is complete, find the files you need in a new window and mount them.
Open the VMDK file and view them to verify their integrity using the appropriate function.
The final step will be to export the files by purchasing a license.