If you use vSphere Replication protection groups, you must specify a placeholder datastore on the recovery site for Site Recovery Manager to use to store placeholder virtual machines.
You must configure a placeholder datastore on both sites in the pair to establish bidirectional protection and to perform reprotect.
Prerequisites
- Verify that you connected and paired the protected and recovery sites.
- Placeholder datastores must meet certain criteria.
- For clusters, the placeholder datastores must be visible to all hosts in the cluster.
Procedure
- In the vSphere Client, click .
- On the Site Recovery home tab, select a site pair and click View Details.
- On the Site Pair tab, select .
- Select a site and click New to configure a placeholder datastore.
- Select a datastore to designate as the location for placeholder virtual machines on the local site, and click Add.
Previously configured datastores appear but you cannot select them. Do not select replicated datastores that
Site Recovery Manager does not manage.
Important: If you use
vSphere Replication, you can select a placeholder datastore that you already use as the target datastore for replications. If you use the same datastore,
Site Recovery Manager creates placeholder VMs by using the names of the replication targets and adding the suffix (1). For information about the
vSphere Replication protection groups, see
vSphere Replication Protection Groups. Selecting the same datastore might lead to confusion when differentiating the replication targets from the placeholder VMs. To avoid confusion, the best practice is to use different datastores.
Make sure that placeholder datastores are not in the same Storage DRS cluster as the vSphere Replication replica target datastores.
Note: When you configure or reconfigure a VM replication by using
vSphere Replication, do not set the placeholder VM folder as a replication folder for the VM.
- Select the other site in the pair.
- Repeat Step 4 to Step 5 to configure a placeholder datastore on the other site.
