Testing my new SRM 5.8 installation, and by testing I mean that I am actually running a "Planned Migration" on a recovery plan using a test VM that was operating in my test environment. The failover from my protected site to my DR/remote site worked flawlessly. On the reprotect the wheels fell off:
First error:
Protection Group '<Protection_Group_Name>' has protected VMs with placeholders which need to be repaired.
As the vmware kb states I re-ran the reprotect again with the "force cleanup" option and the plan progressed further. Until...
Second error:
Placeholder VM for the protected VM 'VM NAME' is missing. Please restore placeholder before continuing.
I could not get past this error and could find little to no documentation of this error.
Now a little bit more about my setup. I am using Vsphere replication and only have replication going from my protect site out to my remote/DR site.
Since I could not get anywhere with the issue I called support and the VMWare engineer told me that in order for the reprotect to work that I had to setup a new Vsphere replication going from my newly failed over, vm at the DR site back to my source/production site?
HUH? Is that really true and if so then what exactly is SRM doing for me? I was under the impression that SRM would automate most of this for me but if I have to setup a special one-time custom replication just to failback then I really don't understand the point of even having this supposed reprotect option. It would be just as easy for me to setup a new one time recovery plan going the other direction.
Can someone clarify this for me?