Before using VMware Live Cyber Recovery, become familiar with some of the caveats and restrictions.

The following section lists current VMware Live Cyber Recovery caveats and limitations as of release date.

General Caveats and Restrictions

  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not support organization level IP Allow List authentication policies. VMware Cloud organization-level IP "Allow Lists" specify IP ranges that are allowed to authenticate using VMware Cloud Services. If this feature is enabled, VMware Live Cyber Recovery will be prevented from accessing the customer account, and your user cannot configure an API token in the VMware Live Cyber Recovery UI or connect the cloud file system to a recovery SDDC. If your organization leverages the IP Allow List feature, please contact support prior to deployment for assistance.
  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not support protecting or recovering (failover) VMs with a Virtual Trusted Platform Module or VMs with secure boot.
  • VMs with VMX files larger than 55KiB cannot be replicated. VMware Live Cyber Recovery doesn't support ingests of VMs with VMX files larger than 55 KiB.
  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not currently support failing over VMs running Windows 11.
  • Only iPv4 is supported for protection recovery plan IP address mapping. Depending on the VM OS:
    • Windows VMs can have an IPv6 address configured on the VM, but ONLY IPv4 addresses can be mapped in a recovery plan.
    • Linux VMs cannot have an IPv6 addresses configured on any network interface, or IP mapping will not be performed.
  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not support recovering VMs to a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC with NFS-mounted external datastores including Amazon FSx for NetApp datastores, Cloud Control Volumes or VMware Cloud Flex Storage.
  • Run VMs live on the cloud file system limitation: You cannot run two failover recovery plans at the same time that 1) both share some of the same VMs and 2) where both plans have storage migration set to 'Run VMs live on the cloud file system'. To avoid this, run one recovery plan at a time when you select this option.
  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not support the following:
    • VMs created by vSphere vApp(s)
    • Fault Tolerant VMs
    • Shared disks
    • VMs that use Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) disks for storage
    • Independent disks and Raw Device Mappings (RDM)
    • Linked and instant VM clones
  • For protected sites with more than 10,000 VMs, you might experience some responsiveness issues with the VMware Live Cyber Recovery UI, such as slow loading of pages or windows when previewing protection group VM membership, creating and editing recovery plans, and during plan compliance checks.
  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery supports up to 2000 tags in a protected site vCenter inventory.
  • VMs created from OVAs or OVFs containing ISO files are not supported if the ISO file is still attached. VMs created from OVAs or OVFs containing ISO files cannot be failed over with storage vMotion, unless the ISO file has been detached prior to taking the failover snapshot.
  • If your environment is running backup software that uses VMware APIs for Data Protection (VADP), then that software’s processes might conflict with VMware Live Cyber Recovery replication as follows:
    • If a VM snapshot is being replicated by VMware Live Cyber Recovery, and another backup solution (non-VMware Live Cyber Recovery) starts a backup of the same VM after VMware Live Cyber Recovery started replication, then the backup might fail if VMware Cloud DR finishes the replication of snapshot before the backup software finishes the backup.

    • If a VM is being backed up by another backup solution, and VMware Live Cyber Recovery starts a snapshot of the same VM after the other backup software started the backup, then the VMware Live Cyber Recovery snapshot might fail if the backup software finishes the backup before VMware Live Cyber Recovery finishes replication of the snapshot. In this case, even though the VMware Live Cyber Recovery VM snapshot failed, the next scheduled snapshot will resume from where it failed.

    For more information, see Standard-frequency snapshots and VADP

  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not support an internet proxy server between the Cyber Recovery connector and the cloud.
  • If you are using the guest file recovery feature with Linux VMs, EXT3 and EXT4 are the only supported file systems for guest file download. Disks managed with Logical volume manager are not supported for guest file download and recovery.

Recovery SDDC Caveats and Restrictions

  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery currently does not support M7i hosts on recovery SDDCs.
  • You can add a recovery SDDC attached to VMware Live Cyber Recovery to an SDDC Group. However, you might fail to attach an existing SDDC to VMware Live Cyber Recovery that is already a member of SDDC Group.
  • When protecting a VMware Cloud on AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts SDDC using VMware Live Cyber Recovery, the recovery SDDC and VMware Live Cyber Recovery deployment must be in the same CSP organization as the protected SDDC.
  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery cannot co-exist in the same Organization as a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC with Faction Cloud Control Volumes.
  • On-premises networks connected to the recovery SDDC over VPN or Direct Connect cannot overlap the VMware Live Cyber Recovery proxy network CIDR: 10.68.97.0/28.
  • When adding an existing SDDC for recovery, the recovery SDDC:
    • Must be on SDDC version 1.18 or higher.
    • Cannot have stretched clusters.

Snapshots Caveats and Restrictions

  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not create snapshots of VM templates. If you include a VM template in a protection group, it will not be included in snapshots.
  • Protection group snapshots do not support replication of encrypted VMs.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Support

VMware Live Cyber Recovery can provide disaster recovery protection for VMs that run on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), as well as the other types of software needed to enable the virtual technologies (e.g., Active Directory, connection servers, etc.). In this release, the following are not supported for VDI:

  • AppVolumes Writable Volumes
  • Modifying AppVolumes AppStacks once failed over
  • Modifying the Horizon Golden Master image once failed over.