VLSR - Placeholder Create Error: Reprotect of the VM failed

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

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 'File Servers' 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. 

Environment

VMware Live Site Recovery

Cause

Reprotect results in the reconfiguration of Site Recovery Manager 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. 

 

VMs in the Protection Group will still show the same errors after REPROTECT completes, this will need to be fixed by RESTORE ALL PLACEHOLDER VMs option 

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.