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Overview

DR tests validate your protection plan without impacting production. Test instances are brought up in an isolated network environment on the DR site, allowing you to confirm recovery procedures and measure actual RTO. Xloud recommends running DR tests at least quarterly.
Regular DR tests are the only way to verify that your RPO and RTO targets are achievable and that recovery runbooks remain accurate as workloads evolve. A DR plan that has never been tested is not a reliable DR plan.
Prerequisites
  • An active protection plan with replication in ACTIVE status
  • DR site is healthy and has sufficient capacity for the test instances
  • Notify the operations team before starting a test — test traffic will appear in monitoring

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Running a DR Test

Start a DR test

Navigate to Disaster Recovery → Protection Plans, select the plan, and click Test Failover. The test brings up recovered instances in an isolated network segment — production traffic is not affected.

Validate recovered workloads

Access the test instances through the isolated DR test network. Run your application validation scripts to confirm the service is operational and data is intact.
Test instances run in an isolated network — they cannot reach production services or external systems. This isolation is intentional and prevents DR test instances from interfering with production.

End the test

Click End Test to terminate the test instances and release the isolated environment. No changes are made to production — the protection plan remains active throughout.
DR test report generated with measured RTO and pass/fail for each validation check.

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Test Report

After each DR test, XDR generates a report including: Export DR test reports from Disaster Recovery → Reports by selecting the test report type and choosing PDF or CSV format. See Compliance for scheduled report delivery.

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DR Test Schedule

XIMP can alert when a DR test has not been run within the configured interval. Navigate to Monitoring → Alerting → Alert Rules and create a rule sourcing xdr_last_test_age_days > 90 to ensure tests are not missed.

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Next Steps

Protection Plans

Update protection plans based on test results

Failover

Full failover procedure when an actual disaster event occurs

XDR Admin — Compliance

Generate RPO/RTO compliance reports from DR test history (administrator)

Troubleshooting

Diagnose DR test failures and instance access issues