A recover to cloud (R2C) service replicates a customer production environment to virtual data centers (VDCs) operated in a cloud service provider environment. Customers provision both a disaster recovery VDC and a test VDC. At A Time of Disaster (ATOD), the disaster VDC is made available to the customer through the cloud. The disaster VDC is allocated a first set of resources dedicated to the specific customer and to disaster recovery. The test VDC, brought on line at A Time of Test (ATOT), is allocated resources from second set of resources arranged in a shared pool, separate from the first set. Provisioning of the test VDC does not disturb critical resource assignments needed in the event of a disaster.