System information

Forcing synchronization of data from the new protection site to the new recovery site ensures that the
recovery site has a current copy of the protected virtual machines running at the protection site. Forcing this
synchronization ensures that recovery is possible immediately after the reprotect process finishes.
To learn how Site Recovery Manager reprotects virtual machines with vSphere Replication, see “How Site
Recovery Manager Reprotects Virtual Machines with vSphere Replication,” on page 85.
How Site Recovery Manager Reprotects Virtual Machines with
vSphere Replication
In the reprotect process using vSphere Replication, Site Recovery Manager reverses the direction of
protection, then forces synchronization of the storage from the new protected site to the new recovery site.
When performing reprotection with vSphere Replication, Site Recovery Manager uses the original VMDK
files as initial copies during synchronization. The full synchronization that appears in the recovery steps
mostly performs checksums, and only a small amount of data is transferred through the network.
Forcing synchronization of data from the new protection site to the new recovery site ensures that the
recovery site has a current copy of the protected virtual machines running at the protection site. Forcing this
synchronization ensures that recovery is possible immediately after the reprotect process finishes.
Preconditions for Performing Reprotect
You can perform reprotect only if you meet certain preconditions.
You can perform reprotect on protection groups that contain virtual machines that are configured for both
array-based replication and for vSphere Replication.
Before you can run reprotect, you must satisfy the preconditions.
1 Run a planned migration and make sure that all steps of the recovery plan finish successfully. If errors
occur during the recovery, resolve the problems that caused the errors and rerun the recovery. When
you rerun a recovery, operations that succeeded previously are skipped. For example, successfully
recovered virtual machines are not recovered again and continue running without interruption.
2 The original protected site must be available. The vCenter Server instances, ESXi Servers,
Site Recovery Manager Server instances, and corresponding databases must all be recoverable.
3 If you performed a disaster recovery operation, you must perform a planned migration when both sites
are running again. If errors occur during the attempted planned migration, you must resolve the errors
and rerun the planned migration until it succeeds.
Reprotect is not available under certain circumstances.
n
Recovery plans cannot finish without errors. For reprotect to be available, all steps of the recovery plan
must finish successfully.
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You cannot restore the original site, for example if a physical catastrophe destroys the original site. To
unpair and recreate the pairing of protected and recovery sites, both sites must be available. If you
cannot restore the original protected site, you must reinstall Site Recovery Manager on the protected
and recovery sites.
Reprotect Virtual Machines
Reprotect results in the reconfiguration of Site Recovery Manager protection groups and recovery plans to
work in the opposite direction. After a reprotect operation, you can recover virtual machines back to the
original site using a planned migration workflow.
Prerequisites
See “Preconditions for Performing Reprotect,” on page 85.
Chapter 7 Reprotecting Virtual Machines After a Recovery
VMware, Inc. 85