"Operation Failed Cannot remove a protection group with protected VMs."
"Invalid: Protected VM deleted."
VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.x
This issue arises when a virtual machine (VM) within a protection group is deleted directly from vCenter, an ESX host UI, or any other method before being removed from the SRM protection group. Consequently, the SRM database isn't updated, leading to stale entries.
Any subsequent attempt to delete the VM or protection group will fail with the error message shown in the above section.
To resolve, the user need to make use of the inbuilt SRM DB tool to remove the stale information from the SRM database table.
Please engage the Broadcom Support to assist in deleting the entry from the SRM database.