System information

Reprotecting Virtual Machines After a
Recovery 7
After a recovery, the recovery site becomes the new protected site, but it is not protected yet. If the original
protected site is operational, you can reverse the direction of protection to use the original protected site as a
new recovery site to protect the new protected site.
Manually reestablishing protection in the opposite direction by recreating all protection groups and
recovery plans is time consuming and prone to errors. Site Recovery Manager provides the reprotect
function, which is an automated way to reverse protection.
After Site Recovery Manager performs a recovery, the protected virtual machines start up on the recovery
site. Because the former protected site might be offline, these virtual machines are not protected. By running
reprotect when the protected site comes back online, you reverse the direction of replication to protect the
recovered virtual machines on the recovery site back to the original protected site.
Reprotect uses the protection information that you established before a recovery to reverse the direction of
protection. You can initiate the reprotect process only after recovery finishes without any errors. If the
recovery finishes with errors, you must fix all errors and rerun the recovery, repeating this process until no
errors occur.
You can conduct tests after a reprotect operation completes, to confirm that the new configuration of the
protected and recovery sites is valid.
You can perform reprotect on protection groups that contain virtual machines that are configured for both
array-based replication and for vSphere Replication.
Example: Performing a Reprotect Operation
Site A is the protected site and site B is the recovery site. If site A goes offline, run the disaster recovery
workflow on the recovery plan to bring the virtual machines online on site B. After the recovery, the
protected virtual machines from site A start up on site B without protection.
When site A comes back online, complete recovery by doing a planned migration because site A virtual
machines and datastores need to be powered down and unmounted before reversing protection. Then
initiate a reprotect operation to protect the recovered virtual machines on site B. Site B becomes the
protected site, and site A becomes the recovery site. Site Recovery Manager reverses the direction of
replication from site B to site A.
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