Your environment, the implementation of your storage policies, and the configuration of the datastores and virtual machines to protect must meet the prerequisites for storage policy protection groups. If they do not meet the prerequisites, Site Recovery Manager might not protect all of the virtual machines in a storage policy protection group.

For the prerequisites that you must satisfy for storage policy protection, see Prerequisites for Storage Policy Protection Groups.

For example, virtual machines that are not associated with a storage policy can reside in a tagged datastore alongside virtual machines that are associated with a storage policy. If you include the storage policy in a storage policy protection group, because these virtual machines are not associated with that storage policy, Site Recovery Manager does not protect them.

Nonprotected virtual machines can appear in storage policy protection groups for reasons other than the non-association of virtual machines with the correct storage policy. For descriptions of other circumstances in which nonprotected virtual machines can appear in storage policy protection groups, see Limitations of Storage Policy Protection Groups.

If a storage policy protection group includes nonprotected virtual machines, these virtual machines appear in the Related Objects > Virtual Machines view for the storage policy protection group. The protection group appears in an error state.

How Site Recovery Manager handles nonprotected virtual machines depends on the type of recovery that you run.

Note: You can only attempt to protect nonprotected virtual machines in storage policy protection groups on which you have never run recovery. If you have successfully or unsuccessfully run recovery on a storage policy protection group that contains nonprotected virtual machines, you must remove those virtual machines from the storage policy protection group.
  • If you run a test recovery on a storage policy protection group that contains nonprotected virtual machines, the operation fails with errors. If a test recovery fails due to nonreplicated virtual machines, run cleanup before you attempt to protect or remove the nonprotected virtual machines, then run the test again. After you have run cleanup, if you have never run a recovery on this protection group, attempt to fix the protection of the affected virtual machines, for example by associating them with the correct storage policy, or by moving virtual machine files from a nonreplicated datastore to a replicated datastore.
  • If you run planned migration on a storage policy protection group that contains nonprotected virtual machines, the operation fails and the recovery plan shows the Incomplete Recovery state. During the deactivation step of planned migration, nonprotected virtual machines on the protected site can prevent Site Recovery Manager from making the storage read-only, or virtual machines might lose access to their data. If a protection group is in the Incomplete Recovery state, you must remove the nonprotected virtual machines out of the protected datastore and disassociate them from the storage policy.
  • If you run disaster recovery on a storage policy protection group that contains nonprotected virtual machines, the operation succeeds but Site Recovery Manager does not recover the nonprotected virtual machines. When the protected site comes back online and you attempt to run planned migration to complete the recovery, the planned migration fails if nonprotected virtual machines are still present on the protected site. If a protection group is in the Incomplete Recovery state, you must remove the nonprotected virtual machines out of the protected datastore and disassociate them from the storage policy.