6.1

Remove Protection from a Virtual Machine
You can temporarily remove protection from a replicated virtual machine in an array-based replication or
vSphere Replication protection group without removing it from its protection group.
NOTE You cannot temporarily remove protection from virtual machines in storage policy protection
groups.
Removing protection deletes the placeholder virtual machine on the recovery site. If you remove protection
from a virtual machine in an array-based replication or vSphere Replication protection group, the states of
the virtual machine and the protection group are set to Not Configured. Running a recovery plan that
contains the protection group succeeds for the protected virtual machines, but Site Recovery Manager does
not recover the virtual machines or protection groups that are in the Not Configured state. If you ran
planned migration, the plan enters the Recovery Incomplete state.
In array-based replication, a distinction exists between the Site Recovery Manager protection of a virtual
machine and the Site Recovery Manager storage management for that virtual machine. If you remove
protection from a virtual machine in an array-based replication protection group, Site Recovery Manager no
longer recovers the virtual machine, but it continues to monitor and manage the storage of the virtual
machine files.
You might remove protection from a virtual machine for different reasons:
n
You use vSphere Replication and you want to exclude a protected virtual machine from a protection
group.
n
You use array-based replication, and someone moves to a replicated datastore a virtual machine that
you do not want to protect. If you remove protection from the virtual machine, the protection group
shows the Not Configured state. Test recovery and planned migration fail for the whole group. Disaster
recovery succeeds, but only for the protected virtual machines in the group and certain operations on
the protected site are skipped. The recovery plan enters the Recovery required state. In this case, move
the virtual machine off the protected datastore.
n
You use array-based replication and a virtual machine has devices that are stored on an unreplicated
datastore. You can remove protection from the virtual machine so that disaster recovery succeeds for all
of the other virtual machines in the group while you relocate the device files.
Removing protection from a virtual machine affects protection groups differently, according to whether you
use array-based replication or vSphere Replication.
n
If you remove protection from a virtual machine that is part of array-based replication protection
group, you must move the files of that virtual machine to an unprotected datastore. If you leave the
files of an unprotected virtual machine in a datastore that Site Recovery Manager has included in a
datastore group, test recovery and planned migration fail for the entire datastore group. Disaster
recovery succeeds, but only for the protected virtual machines in the datastore group, and you must
move the unprotected virtual machine before you can run planned migration to complete the recovery.
n
If you disable vSphere Replication on a virtual machine that you included in a protection group,
recovery fails for this virtual machine but succeeds for all of the correctly configured virtual machines
in the protection group. You must remove protection from the virtual machine and remove the virtual
machine from the protection group, either by editing the protection group or by clicking Remove VM.
See “Add or Remove Datastore Groups or Virtual Machines to or from a Protection Group,” on page 56.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, click Site Recovery > Protection Groups.
2 Select an array-based replication or a vSphere Replication protection group and select Related Objects
> Virtual Machines.
Site Recovery Manager Administration
60 VMware, Inc.