Traditional DR testing is scheduled for after hours, requires complex manual scripts, and comes with the risk of overwriting production resources during the test itself. Due to these drawbacks testing often gets deprioritized or skipped entirely, and teams end up relying on hope instead of a rehearsed, repeatable process.  

Infrastructure requirements compound the problem. Traditional DR testing often requires identical hardware and matching hypervisors at the recovery site, creating a hypervisor lock-in trap that makes testing rigid, expensive, and hard to scale across environments.  

Even when failover is tested, fallback is usually left out. A DR test is not complete until systems have successfully returned to production, but reverse replication is  frequently complex enough that teams stop after failover and never test the full cycle.  

What You Will Learn

This session covers how to address each of these gaps directly: measuring actual recovery performance, testing without disrupting production, removing infrastructure lock-in from the testing process, and treating fallback as a required part of every DR test:  

• Why a documented RTO/RPO is not the same as a tested recovery outcome 

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• How to measure Operational Recovery (the time to a confirmed, clean, usable application state) rather than relying on theoretical checkpoint metrics alone 

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• How to execute isolated, non-disruptive DR fire drills without touching the live production environment  

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• Why "Rehearsable DR" turns disaster recovery into a repeatable workflow, and what shifting to that model requires operationally  

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• How breaking free of hypervisor lock-in allows DR testing across physical, virtual, or cloud environments without matching 1:1 infrastructure at the recovery site  

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• How automated, bi-directional replication supports fallback, making full-cycle testing (of both failover and return to production) as routine as the failover test itself