How Site Recovery Manager Interacts with vSphere High Availability

You can use Site Recovery Manager to protect virtual machines on which vSphere High Availability (HA) is enabled.

HA protects virtual machines from ESXi host failures by restarting virtual machines from hosts that fail on new hosts within the same site. Site Recovery Manager protects virtual machines against full site failures by restarting the virtual machines at the recovery site. The key difference between HA and Site Recovery Manager is that HA operates on individual virtual machines and restarts the virtual machines automatically. Site Recovery Manager operates at the recovery plan level and requires a user to initiate a recovery manually.

To transfer the HA settings for a virtual machine onto the recovery site, you must set the HA settings on the placeholder virtual machine before performing recovery, at any time after you have configured the protection of the virtual machine.

You can replicate HA virtual machines by using array-based replication or vSphere Replication. If HA restarts a protected virtual machine on another host on the protected site, vSphere Replication will perform a full sync after the virtual machine restarts.

Site Recovery Manager does not require HA as a prerequisite for protecting virtual machines. Similarly, HA does not require Site Recovery Manager.