A fire drill procedure verifies the fault-readiness of a disaster recovery configuration. This procedure is performed without stopping the application at the Primary site and disrupting user access.

A fire drill is performed at the Secondary site using a special service group for fire drills. The fire drill service group is identical to the application service group, but uses a fire drill resource in place of the replication agent resource. The fire drill service group uses a copy of the data that is used by the application service group.

Almost all of the replication agents have a corresponding fire drill agent bundled with them. These fire drill agents are responsible for taking a snapshot inside the storage array and importing the snapshot disks on the hosts. The fire drill agents are named similar to the replication agents with the suffix "Snap" appended to the agent name. For example, the fire drill agent for EMC SRDF is SRDFSnap and the fire drill agent for Hitachi TrueCopy (HTC) agent is HTCSnap.

For more information about configuring fire drills, please refer the Installation and Configuration Guide of the appropriate replication agent.