Placeholder Create Error: Reprotect of the VM failed
Article ID: 375505
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
Placeholder create errors surface when running REPROTECT operations.
1. Reprotect operation does not complete
2. Reprotect fails with errors like -
Error - Protection group 'XXXXXXX' has protected VMs with placeholders which need to be repaired.
Placeholder Create Error: Reprotect of the VM 'FS1' failed. Try fixing the problem and invoking repair. If the problem persists, try deleting the old production VM and invoking repair. An error occurred while communicating with the remote host.
ERROR
Operation Failed
Protection group 'File Servers' has protected VMs with placeholders which need to be repaired.
Operation ID: 61180f3b-c173-4866-a7b7-d1a74bacd6c7
8/17/24, 10:08:42 AM -0500
3. Protection Group is stuck in a reprotecting state.
4. Recovery plan can't be failed over to its original site until this issue is fixed.
5. Additionally during the failback operation, we may observe error
Placeholder Create Error: Reprotect of the VM 'XXXXX' failed. Try fixing the problem and invoking repair. If the problem persists, try deleting the old production VM and invoking repair. Unable to access the virtual machine configuration: Unable to access file [datastore] vm-XXX.vmx
Environment
VMware Live Site Recovery
Cause
Reprotect results in the reconfiguration of protection groups and recovery plans to work in the opposite direction. After a reprotect operation, you can recover virtual machines back to the original site using a planned migration workflow.
Reprotection failures or placeholder create errors are unique and could occur due to numerous reasons. One has to look at the series of recovery workflows that were run to determine the cause of such errors along with checking the SRM logs.
Resolution
Understanding the workflow of Reprotecting Virtual Machines After a Recovery will help you understand the overall recovery process better & the various backend processes involved during this operation.
Select the Force Cleanup check box to ignore such errors during the cleanup operation, and run the cleanup again. If necessary, run cleanup several times, until it finishes without errors.
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'
Note: There is no impact to workloads when implementing the above steps.
Perform a TEST recovery before failing over the recovery plan to its original site, just to ensure that it doesn't fail with any errors. If the TEST recovery results are successful, you can then proceed to run a PLANNED MIGRATION.
After fixing this issue, check the resource and folder mappings. If you are seeing the same error every time you run a PLANNED MIGRATION, its better to delete the resource & folder mappings and recreate them.
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