Creating and Managing Protection Groups

After you configure a replication solution, you can create protection groups. A protection group is a collection of virtual machines that Site Recovery Manager protects together.

You can include one or more protection groups in a recovery plan. A recovery plan specifies how Site Recovery Manager recovers the virtual machines in the protection groups that it contains.

After you configure replication on virtual machines, you must assign each virtual machine to an existing resource pool, folder, and network on the recovery site. You can specify site-wide defaults for these assignments by selecting inventory mappings. For vSphere Replication protection groups, if you do not specify inventory mappings, you configure mappings individually for each virtual machine in the protection group.

After you create a vSphere Replication protection group, Site Recovery Manager creates placeholder virtual machines on the recovery site and applies the inventory mappings to each virtual machine in the group. If Site Recovery Manager cannot map a virtual machine to a folder, network, or resource pool on the recovery site, Site Recovery Manager sets the virtual machine to the Mapping Missing status, and does not create a placeholder for it.

Site Recovery Manager cannot protect virtual machines on which you did not configure or on which you incorrectly configured replication.