You can run a recovery plan for failback from arecovery SDDC to a protected site.

Failback from a recovery 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 or has had any virtual disks added after failover and prior to failback.
You can run the failback recovery plan by clicking the Failback button.
Note: If you perform a failback of a VM from a high-frequency snapshot, and it fails, all retried failbacks for this VM will require a full restore (which can take longer than ususal).
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 powering off the VM. 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.

If you select a new protected site for failback with the proper mappings configured, incremental recovery is not always possible. If VMware Live Cyber Recovery can find a VM with the same instance UUID, then an incremental recovery is performed. If VMware Live Cyber Recovery 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:
  • Once you start a failback plan, do not make any inventory changes on the protected site until the failback completes. You cannot edit a recovery plan once the plan has been started. Importantly, do not power on any VMs in a plan during a failback operation. Wait until the failback completes, and then you can power on VMs in the plan.
  • VMware Live Cyber Recovery 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.
  • During failback, VMware Live Cyber Recovery does not remove any tags associated with a VM. For example, if a VM on a protected site has tag1, and the same VM on the recovery SDDC has tag2, when you fail back the VM it will have both tag1 and tag2.