Creation of new Protection Group gets stuck at 57%

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

On trying to create a new Protection Group the progress does not move beyond 57%.

Protection Group though does show up in the Protection Group list but with a warning.
'Issues' tab in the Protection Group shows the configuration issue with no Placeholder Datastore available for the cluster in question.
Complete error is seen in that Protection Group > 'Virtual Machines' Tab as Protection Status:

"Placeholder Create Error: Unable to find a placeholder datastore for the host/cluster xxxxxx-xxx. Any placeholder datastores registered with the SRM server that were deleted and recreated in the vCenter Server will need to be removed and re-added as a new placeholder datastore with the SRM server as well."

Environment

Site Recovery Manager 8.x
Vmware Live Site Recovery 9.x

Cause

There was a missing Placeholder Datastore mapping for the DR cluster configured for failover (for which the Resource and Folder Mappings were configured).

Resolution

a) To map a non-replicating datastore as Placeholder Datastore for the Recovery site.
b) Restart the SRM server (vmware-dr) and SRM client (dr-client) services to clear and stale tasks.
c) Recreate the Protection Group.