For storage policy protection, Site Recovery Manager applies inventory mappings to virtual machines when you run a recovery plan that contains a storage policy protection group.

With array-based and vSphere Replication protection groups, Site Recovery Manager applies inventory mappings at the moment that you configure protection on a virtual machine. With storage policy protection groups, because storage policy protection is dynamic, Site Recovery Manager only applies the inventory mappings at the moment that you run a recovery plan. Virtual machine placement decisions are made according to the inventory mappings when a recovery plan runs, so Site Recovery Manager does not create placeholder virtual machines on the recovery site.

Because Site Recovery Manager applies inventory mappings for storage policy protection groups when you run a recovery plan, you cannot configure individual mappings on virtual machines in storage policy protection groups. Site Recovery Manager always uses the site-wide inventory mappings when you run a recovery with storage policy protection. If inventory mappings are missing, test recovery, planned migration, and disaster recovery of recovery plans that contain storage policy protection groups fail. You can configure Site Recovery Manager to periodically poll the virtual machines in storage policy protection groups for missing mappings and report a warning if any mappings are missing that can cause the storage policy protection group recovery to fail. For information about how to configure periodic polling for missing mappings, see Change Replication Settings.

Note: If the network mapping is missing but the other mappings are present and you run a test recovery, Site Recovery Manager uses the auto-generated test network and the test succeeds with a warning. If a test recovery succeeds with a warning about the missing network mapping, configure the network mapping and run the test again. Planned migration and disaster recovery do not use the test network and fail if the network mapping is missing.

If a recovery plan fails due to missing mappings and the protected site is available, configure the missing mappings and run the plan again. For information about how to configure site-wide inventory mappings, see Configure Inventory Mappings.

Resource Inventory Mappings and Storage Policy Protection Groups

As a result of the dynamic virtual machine protection, storage policy protection groups have specific requirements and limitations on how to set resource inventory mappings.
  • Site Recovery Manager requires existing resource inventory mappings for all top-level compute resources (clusters or unmanaged hosts) on the protection site that have mounted the datastores protected by a storage policy protection group.
  • Site Recovery Manager determines the desired visibility of the recovered datastore based on top-level compute resource mappings and does not consider resource mappings for resource pools.
    • If there is no resource mapping for its parent top-level compute resource, Site Recovery Manager cannot apply an existing mapping for a resource pool.
    • An existing mapping of a protection site resource pool to a different recovery compute resource hierarchy compared to its parent, does not expose the storage of virtual machines under that resource pool to the mapped compute resource.
For a successful storage policy protection group recovery, you must observe the following rules when creating resource mappings.
  • Create resource mappings for all protected top-level compute resources (clusters or unmanaged hosts) which have mounted datastores protected by a storage policy protection group.
  • If you must create additional mappings for resource pools, map them to a target under the same top-level recovery compute resource, to which their parent top-level protected compute resource is mapped. For example, when the protected host or cluster P is mapped to a recovery host or cluster R or a recovery resource pool under R, then all protected resource pools under P must also be mapped to R or a recovery resource pool under R.

Temporary Placeholder Mappings for Storage Policy Protection

Site Recovery Manager applies inventory mappings for storage policy protection at the moment that you run a recovery plan. If you run a recovery plan that contains storage policy protection groups and you have not configured inventory mappings, or if the objects that you mapped are missing, test recovery, planned migration, and disaster recovery fail.

You can usually only configure inventory mappings when both the protected site and the recovery site are available. If a recovery plan with storage policy protection groups fails due to missing mappings and the protected site is not available, you cannot configure the missing mappings in the normal way. To mitigate this situation, when a recovery fails due to missing mappings and the protected site is not available, Site Recovery Manager creates temporary placeholder mappings. Temporary placeholder mappings allow you to configure the missing mappings so that you can run the recovery successfully when the protected site is offline. Temporary placeholder mappings are incomplete mappings that identify inventory objects on the protected site that contain virtual machines that are included in the recovery plan. The temporary placeholder mappings do not include target objects on the recovery site. When a recovery fails due to missing mappings, the protected site is unavailable, and Site Recovery Manager creates temporary placeholder mappings, you can complete the temporary placeholder mappings and rerun the recovery successfully.

For information about how to configure temporary placeholder mappings, see Configure Temporary Placeholder Mappings.