What is the purpose of performing a planned failover during a disaster recovery scenario?

A planned failover in Veeam Backup & Replication is designed for disaster avoidance or planned maintenance scenarios. Its primary purpose is to transfer workloads to a replica without any data loss, thereby ensuring strict data consistency. It achieves this by gracefully shutting down the source VM, performing a final replication cycle to capture any last-minute changes, and then powering on the replica VM at the disaster recovery site.

B. Planned failover is a workload migration and disaster avoidance mechanism; it does not increase or manage storage capacity.

C. Planned failover triggers a final incremental replication pass to sync the latest changes, not a full backup.

D. Testing a replica's functionality and recoverability is accomplished using the SureReplica feature (Virtual Labs), not through a planned failover.

1. Veeam Backup & Replication v12 Official Documentation, "Planned Failover" section. (https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/plannedfailover.html)

2. Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) v12/v13 Courseware, Module: "Replication and Failover".