You must specify a placeholder datastore for Site Recovery Manager to use to store placeholder virtual machines on the recovery site.

About this task

You must configure a placeholder datastore on both sites in the pair to establish bidirectional protection and reprotect.

Prerequisites

Verify that you connected and paired the protected and recovery sites.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Web Client, click Site Recovery > Sites, and select a site.
  2. On the Manage tab, click Placeholder Datastores.
  3. Click the icon to configure a placeholder datastore.
  4. Select a datastore to designate as the location for placeholder virtual machines on the local site, and click OK.

    Previously configured datastores appear but you cannot select them. If a datastore is replicated, but Site Recovery Manager does not have an array manager for that datastore, the option to select the replicated datastore might be available. Do not select replicated datastores that Site Recovery Manager does not manage.

    Important:

    If you use vSphere Replication, you can select a placeholder datastore that you already use as the target datastore for replications. If you use the same datastore, Site Recovery Manager creates placeholder VMs by using the names of the replication targets and adding the suffix(1). For information about the vSphere Replication protection groups, see the vSphere Replication Protection Groups topic in the Site Recovery Manager Administration. Selecting the same datastore might lead to confusion when differentiating the replication targets from the placeholder VMs .To avoid confusion, the best practice is to use different datastores.

    Make sure placeholder datastores are not in the same Storage DRS cluster as the vSphere Replication replica target datastores.

  5. Select the other site in the pair.
  6. Repeat 2 to 4 to configure a placeholder datastore on the other site.