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Table Of Contents
Reprotecting Virtual Machines After a
Recovery 9
After a recovery, the recovery site becomes the primary site, but the virtual machines are 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 virtual machines start up on the recovery site. 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 recovery plans that contain array-based replication protection groups,
vSphere Replication protection groups, and storage policy protection groups.
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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