Site Recovery Manager can automatically remove the protection of an already protected virtual machine if it meets certain preconditions.

The automatic protection removal functionality is available for array-based replication protection groups and Virtual Volumes replication protection groups. The automatic protection removal is not supported for vSphere Replication protection groups. To use the automatic protection removal functionality, you must activate both the advanced settings for Automatic Protection and the advanced settings for Automatic Protection Removal. For more information see, Change the Automatic Protection Settings.

To become eligible for automatic protection removal, the virtual machines must fall into one of the following categories.
  • For array-based replication and Virtual Volumes replication protection groups, protected VMs for which the production VM is no longer registered in the vCenter Server inventory.
  • For array-based replication protection groups, protected VMs for which all disks, configuration files, snapshot descriptors, and other critical for failover file backed devices are provisioned or moved on datastores that are not part of the replicated datastore groups from which the protected VM is part of.
  • For Virtual Volumes replication groups, protected VMs for which all disks, configuration files, snapshot descriptors, and other critical for failover file backed devices are no longer part of Virtual Volumes replication groups that in turn are part of corresponding protection groups.
Caution: When the automatic protection removal is activated and the virtual machine is unprotected you cannot recover the VM. When the automatic protection removal is deactivated and the virtual machine is unregistered from the vCenter Server inventory, if the protected virtual machine is still available, you can run the recovery and get the virtual machine up and running on the recovery site. Activate the automatic protection removal functionality only when reconfiguring protection groups is intended.

Once the protection is automatically removed, the virtual machine can become eligible for protection immediately in another protection group or after some time in the same protection group or a different protection group. If the the virtual machine is automatically protected within a configurable amount of time, the VM is associated with the last used recovery settings. If the virtual machine is automatically protected after that period of time, the VM uses the default recovery settings. The lifetime for the archived records for the recovery settings is configured through the replication.archiveRecoverySettingsLifetime advanced setting. You can use the replication.archiveRecoverySettingsCleanupInterval advanced setting to configure the time interval in minutes between separate executions of the task to cleanup old archived VM recovery settings. For more information, see Change Replication Settings.