[VMC] Inaccessible placeholder VMs at the recovery site

Products

• VMware Cloud on AWS

Issue/Introduction

To explain the workflow for restoring these placeholder VMs.

Symptoms:
Placeholder VMs leveraged by Site Recovery Manager(UI) are shown as inaccessible objects within the destination site(recovery site) vCenter UI.
Within the SRM UI, at the protected site, protected Virtual Machines(VMs) have a Protection Status that states 'Placeholder VM not found'.

Cause

A cluster or host event that impacts vSAN storage and its ability to recover these objects.
Utilization of an FTT=0 storage policy at the destination site prior to a host failure.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, the placeholder VMs need to be restored.
Step 1:
Navigate to the destination site(recovery site) vCenter.
Locate the inaccessible VMs and remove them from the inventory.

Step 2:
At the source site(protected site), Navigate to the Site Recovery Plugin UI.
Select the Site pairing and then navigate to Protection Groups.
Select the relevant protection group from the left pane.
Within the right pane, select the VM that shows a Protection Status of 'Placeholder VM not found'
At the top of the VM list, select 'RESTORE ALL PLACEHOLDER VMS'



Confirm that the placeholder VMs are no longer inaccessible after the operation completes.

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:
There is No impact to workloads when implementing this resolution