5.5

Table Of Contents
Reprotecting Virtual Machines After a
Recovery 5
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. SRM provides the reprotect function, which is an
automated way to reverse protection.
After SRM 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 complete the reprotect process only after a recovery finishes. 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, SRM recovers the protected
virtual machines to 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, you can run 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. SRM reverses the direction
of replication from site B to site A.
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