In the reprotect process using vSphere Replication, VMware Live Site Recovery reverses the direction of protection, then forces synchronization of the storage from the new protected site to the new recovery site.

When performing reprotection with vSphere Replication, VMware Live Site Recovery uses the original VMDK files as initial copies during synchronization. The full synchronization that appears in the recovery steps mostly performs checksums, and only a small amount of data is transferred through the network.

Forcing synchronization of data from the new protection site to the new recovery site ensures that the recovery site has a current copy of the protected virtual machines running at the protection site. Forcing this synchronization ensures that recovery is possible immediately after the reprotect process finishes.

If you want to manually set up reverse replication on a vSphere Replication protected virtual machine, use the VMware Live Site Recovery user interface to force stop the incoming replication group on the old recovery site, which is the new protected site. If you just delete the virtual machine on the original protected site, the reprotect will fail.

If you are using vSphere Replication and VMware Live Site Recovery and perform reprotect on a replication without enhanced capabilities, the replication will be automatically converted to enhanced replication, if the enhanced setup is supported by both sites. Even if you reconfigure the replication to go back to a replication without enhanced capabilities, when you perform another reprotect operation, it will be automatically converted to enhanced replication.
  • Enhanced replications require minimum versions vSphere Replication 9.0.x, vCenter Server 8.0u2, and ESXi host 8.0u2 on the target site when the target is an on-premises SDDC.
  • vSphere Replication 9.0 requires network encryption for Enhanced replications.
  • Enhanced replications require TCP network connectivity on ports 31031 and 32032 from the ESXi hosts on which the replicated VMs are running to the ESXi hosts of the cluster containing the target datastore. Make sure your firewall settings are adjusted accordingly.