# Performing a failover with Elastic Disaster Recovery
Performing a failover

A failover is the redirection of traffic from a primary system to a secondary system. It's a network operation that's performed outside of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery helps you perform a failover by launching recovery instances in AWS. Once the Recovery instances are launched, you will need to redirect the traffic from your primary systems to the launched recovery instances. 

**Note**  
These instructions also apply to the cross-Region or cross-AZ failover process.

## Launching recovery instances


### Ready for launch indicators


Prior to launching a Recovery instance, ensure that your source servers are ready for testing by looking for these indicators on the **Source Servers ** page: 

1. Under the **Ready for recovery** column, the server should show **Ready** 

1. Under the **Data replication status** column, the server should show the **Healthy** status. 

1. Under the **Last recovery result** column, there should be an indication of a successful Drill instance launch sometime in the past. The column should state **Successful** and show when the last successful launch occurred. This column may be empty if a significant amount of time passed since your last drill instance launch. 

### Launching recovery instances


To launch a recovery instance for a single source server or multiple source servers:

1. Go to the **Source servers** page and select each server for which you want to launch a recovery instance.

1. Open the **Initiate recovery job** menu and select **Initiate recovery**.

1. Select the Point in time snapshot from which to launch the recovery instance for the selected source server. You can either select the **Use most recent data ** option to use the latest snapshot available or select an earlier specific Point-in-time snapshot. You may opt to select an earlier snapshot in case you wish to return to a specific server configuration before a disaster occurred.

1. Choose **Initiate recovery**.

[Learn more about Point in Time snapshots.](CloudEndure-Concepts.md#point-in-time-faq) 

The AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Console will indicate **Recovery job is creating drill instance for X source servers** when the drill has started. 

Click **View job details** on the dialog to view the specific job for the test launch in the **Recovery job history** tab. 

### Successful recovery instance launch indicators


You can tell that the recovery instance launch started successfully through several indicators on the **Source servers** page. 

1. The **Last recovery result** column will show the status of the recovery launch and the time of the launch. A successful recovery instance launch will show the **Successful** status. A launch that is still in progress will show the **Pending** status. 

1. The launched recovery instance will appear on the **Recovery instances** page. [Learn more about the Recovery instances page.](recovery-instances.md) 

1. You can now redirect traffic from your primary systems to the launched recovery instances. 

**Note**  
Launch of a new recovery instance from the same source server will clean up all the previous recovery instances, regardless if they have been disconnected and deleted from DRS