After Site Recovery Manager performs a recovery, you can perform a failback to restore the original configuration of the protected and recovery sites.

To aid comprehension, the original protected site from before a recovery is site A. The original recovery site is site B. After a recovery from site A to site B, the recovered virtual machines are running on site B without protection.

Prerequisites

Verify that the following conditions are in place.

  • You have performed a recovery, either as part of a planned migration or as part of a disaster recovery.
  • The original protected site, site A, is running.
  • If you performed a disaster recovery, you must perform a planned migration recovery when the hosts and datastores on the original protected site, site A, are running again.
  • You did not run reprotect since the recovery.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client or the vSphere Web Client, click Site Recovery > Open Site Recovery.
  2. On the Site Recovery home tab, select a site pair and click View Details.
  3. Select the Recovery Plans tab, right-click a recovery plan and select Reprotect.
  4. Select the check box to confirm that you understand that the reprotect operation is irreversible and determine whether to enable Force Cleanup, and click Next.
    Force Cleanup is only available after you have run reprotect once and errors occured. Enabling this option forces the removal of virtual machines, ignoring errors, and returns the recovery plan to the ready state.
  5. Review the reprotect information and click Finish.
  6. Select the recovery plan and click Recovery Steps to monitor the reprotect operation until it finishes.
  7. (Optional) If necessary, rerun reprotect until it finishes without errors.
    At the end of the reprotect operation, Site Recovery Manager has reversed replication, so that the original recovery site, site B, is now the protected site.
  8. (Optional) After the test completes, right-click the recovery plan and select Cleanup to clean up the recovery plan.
  9. Right-click the recovery plan and select Recovery to run the recovery plan as a planned migration.
  10. Select the recovery plan and click Recovery Steps to monitor the planned migration until it finishes.
    The planned migration shuts down the virtual machines on the new protected site, site B, and starts up the virtual machines on the new recovery site, site A. If necessary, rerun the planned migration until it finishes without errors.
    When the planned migration completes, the virtual machines are running on the original protected site, site A, but the virtual machines are not protected. The virtual machines on the original recovery site, site B, are powered off.
  11. Right-click the recovery plan and select Reprotect and follow the instructions of the wizard to perform a second reprotect operation.
    Running reprotect again reestablishes protection in the original direction from before the recovery.

Results

You restored the protected and recovery sites to their original configuration before the recovery. The protected site is site A, and the recovery site is site B.