When you initiate the reprotect process,

Site Recovery Manager

instructs the underlying storage arrays to reverse the direction of replication. After reversing the replication,

Site Recovery Manager

creates placeholder virtual machines at the new recovery site, which was the original protected site before the reprotect operation.

When creating placeholder virtual machines on the new protected site,

Site Recovery Manager

uses the location of the original protected virtual machine to determine where to create the placeholder virtual machine.

Site Recovery Manager

uses the identity of the original protected virtual machine to create the placeholder. If the original protected virtual machines are no longer available,

Site Recovery Manager

uses the inventory mappings from the original recovery site to the original protected site to determine the resource pools and folders for the placeholder virtual machines. You must configure inventory mappings on both sites before running the reprotect process, or the process might fail.

When reprotecting virtual machines with array-based replication,

Site Recovery Manager

places the files for the placeholder virtual machines in the placeholder datastore for the original protected site, not in the datastore that held the original protected virtual machines.

Forcing synchronization of data from the new protection site to the new recovery site ensures that the recovery site has a current copy of the protected virtual machines running at the protection site. Forcing this synchronization ensures that recovery is possible immediately after the reprotect process finishes.