VMware Cloud DR protection groups are bound by specific caveats and restrictions.

Note: These considerations apply to both standard and high-frequency snapshots. For caveats specific to high-frequency snapshots, see here.
  • VMware Cloud DR does not support using protection groups for VMs with:
    • Shared disk clusters. Do not configure a protection group for any VMs that reside on a shared disk in a shared disk cluster.
    • VMs that use Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) disks for storage
    • Independent disks and Raw Device Mappings (RDM)
    • Encrypted VMs
  • The members of a single protection group must share the same vCenter. In other words, you cannot create a protection group that contains VMs from two different vCenters.
  • VMware Cloud DR does not support protecting VMs that belong to two different vCenters but share the same VM instanceUUID. An instanceUUID is a unique identifier that is used by vCenter Server to uniquely identify a Virtual Machine within a vCenter Server. If two VMs have the same instanceUUID, you cannot protect those VMs with VMware Cloud DR.
  • VMware Transit Connect not supported. You cannot use VMware Transit Connect to send replication data traffic from your protected site to VMware Cloud DR.
  • Cannot clone DRaaS Connector VMs. VMware Cloud DR does not support cloning DRaaS Connector VMs.
  • VMs ignored by snapshot replication. Protection group snapshots ignore VMs that provide infrastructure services for your vSphere environment, even if the protection group definition indicates that the VM should be included. (For example, if the PG is defined with the "*" VM name pattern). Specifically, protection groups exclude the following types of VMs from snapshots:
    • VMware Cloud DR DRaaS Connector VMs.
    • VMware Cloud on AWS Management VMs.
    • vCLS (cluster service VMs).
  • Datasets not supported for snapshot replication, single VM recovery, and failover/failback for vSphere 8 VMs. VMware Cloud DR does not support capturing datasets in snapshot replication or VM recovery operations.The VMware vSphere 8.0 release provides a new datasets feature that only works on VMs with virtual hardware version 20 (hardware version 20 is new to vSphere 8.0).
  • Event logged when replicating a VM with datasets (not supported). During snapshot replication, any dataset information in VMs is deleted, and an event is logged in VMware Cloud DR. If you attempt to recover, fail over, or fail back a VM with datasets, the missing dataset information is ignored. For example, if you attempt to fail over a VM with datasets, you see an event like this: "Datasets file of VM ‘VM-DB’ is ignored in snapshot ‘PG-snapshot Daily Backups'..
  • VMware Cloud DR does not support protecting the same VM with two cloud file systems. If a VM is being protected with high-frequency snapshots replicating to two cloud file systems, the replication task will fail with a 'PeAlreadyClaimed' error. If a VM is being protected with standard-frequency snapshots replicating to two cloud file systems, the replication task will fail with no error given. Additionally, this scenario could also occur if a VM belongs to one vCenter, and the vCenter is registered to two separate protected sites, and each protected site is replicating snapshots of that VM to different cloud file systems.
  • Only five snapshot replication tasks can be run concurrently across all protection groups (on all protected sites). If more than five snapshot replication tasks are started at the same time, the first five tasks are started, and the remaining snapshot tasks are queued until the first five finish, and continues until all tasks are completed.
  • VMware Cloud DR does not snapshot VM templates. If you include a VM template in a protection group, the snapshot does not capture the template.
  • No changing vSphere configuration during snapshot replication. Do not make any vSphere environmental or configuration changes when a snapshot is in progress, or you can experience accuracy issues with the snapshot.