SRM Re-protect Operation Timed Out Due to Missing Mappings and Invalid VM Protection Group

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms

• The SRM Re-protect operation timed out after 2100 seconds in Recovery Plan

• Errors such as "Missing mappings" and "Invalid: Protected VM deleted" were observed on the Protection Group.

• This issue occurred after virtual machines were removed from the inventory and re-registered to the DR site in preparation for a manual failback to production.
• The failback was blocked due to datastore sync issues.

Environment

vSphere Replication 8.x

Site Recovery Manager 8.x

Cause

The issue was caused by missing reverse mappings in the resource mappings configuration between the protected and recovery sites.

In a bidirectional SRM setup, reverse resource mappings are required to ensure that VMs can be properly tracked and recovered back to the original site after a failover. The absence of these mappings prevents SRM from handling the recovery process correctly, resulting in missing VM mappings and errors related to invalid protection groups.

Resource Mappings from DR and DC will be shown as below :

Resolution

Workaround:

1. Configure Reverse Replication: Ensure that reverse replication is configured for the Active-Active cluster and BCRM DR setup.

2. Restore Placeholder VMs:

   • Log in to the DR site vCenter where the VM placeholders reside.

   • Search for the VM name.

   • Right-click the placeholder VM and select Remove from Inventory.

   • Go to the Site Recovery UI on the Production site.

   • Navigate to Protection Group > VMs > Select the VM name.

   • Click on the three dots […] and select Recreate the Placeholder.

3. Remove Invalid Protection:

   • For VMs marked as "Invalid Protected VM" due to old placeholder locations, remove the protection for these VMs.

4. Test Recovery: After performing the above steps, initiate a test recovery. The issue should no longer be present, and the protection status should be restored to "OK."