After you set up a protected site, you can deploy the Cyber Recovery connector, a stateless virtual appliance that enables replicating VM snapshot deltas from a protected site to the cloud file system, which are used for recovery operations.

The Cyber Recovery connector is distributed as a virtual appliance in the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. You can deploy the Cyber Recovery connector in vCenter Server to enable data protection of VMs within on-premises vSphere or VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs.

The Cyber Recovery connector can be redeployed if needed at any time without losing backup data. Software upgrades for it are over-the-air and automatic across time. Each connector provides additional replication bandwidth for the site.

Before you deploy the connector, see System and Network Requirements.
Note: VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not support cloning Cyber Recovery connector VMs.

For VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC protected sites, you must deploy the Cyber Recovery connector on each cluster in the SDDC to protect the VMs running on those clusters. If you do not deploy the Cyber Recovery connector on an SDDC cluster, then you cannot add the VMs from those clusters to protection groups.

Deploying the Cyber Recovery connector consists of the following tasks: