You can run a recovery plan to fail back from a Recovery SDDC to a protected site.

Failback from an SDDC returns only changed data. There is no rehydration, and the data remains in its native compressed and deduplicated form.
Note: VMware Cloud does not support failback of a VM that has its disk geometry changed after failover.

You can run the failback plan by clicking the Failover from VMC button.

Failback from a recovery SDDC runs several steps, including the following:
  • VMs are powered off on the recovery SDDC.
  • The last VM snapshot is taken following the power off. The differences between the VM state at the time of recovery and failback are then applied to the snapshot used for recovery to construct a VM backup on the cloud file system for subsequent retrieval.
  • These VM backups are then retrieved to a protected site system using a general forever incremental protocol.
  • VMs are recovered to a protected site.
  • Upon successful recovery, VMs are automatically deleted from the recovery SDDC.

Once a failback Recovery Plan is created from duplicating the plan and reversing its steps, the new failback plan operates the same way as any other plan. You can edit the plan to change the destination site to point to a new protected site. Or, you can change the vCenter mapping if the failback target site has more than one protected site.

You can also use a new protected site for failback, if the proper mappings are configured, but in this case incremental recovery is not possible. However, if VMware Cloud DR can find a VM with the same instance UUID, then an incremental recovery is performed. If VMware Cloud DR cannot find the same instance UUID for a VM, then a full recovery is initiated.

General Caveats for Failback

Failback operations have the following restrictions:
  • You cannot add an individual VM recovery step in failback plans. However, you can restore VMs individually from a protection group snapshot.
  • VMware Cloud DR cannot failback any newly-created VMs post-recovery in the SDDC that match the PG name pattern or folder criteria defined in a Recovery Plan. This means that any new VMs that were created after recovery and that match PG name patterns in the Recovery Plan are not included when you perform a failback operation to a new or restored protected site. In this situation, an error is generated indicating that the new VMs were not failed back.
  • VMware Cloud DR does not support failover or failback for a VM that resides on an Amazon FSx for NetApp datastore on ther Recovery SDDC.