Managing Protection When the Recovery Datastore Will Be Unavailable (Datastore Maintenance)
When access to a recovery datastore is not available, for example, during maintenance of the datastore, you have to change the datastore in all affected VPGs to enable protection to continue.
Note: Changing the datastore directly in the Edit VM dialog or if the datastore used for the journal is not set to Default in the Advanced Journal Settings dialog, causes the VPG to undergo an initial synchronization.
During the following procedures the journal used for recovery is reset and until the VPG returns to a protecting state, recovery is not possible.
To enable protection to continue when a virtual machine recovery storage will be unavailable:
1. Remove all virtual machines from the VPG definitions that use the unavailable storage as the recovery storage.
When saving the VPG a warning is displayed.
2. Click No.
Note: A VPG must always have at least one virtual machine defined and therefore you cannot remove all the virtual machines from a VPG at once. If all the VPGs use a datastore that requires maintenance, remove all but one of the virtual machines and after completing this procedure, adding the virtual machines back to the VPG, repeat the procedure with the last virtual machine.
3. Change the default recovery datastore in the VPG definition to a new default datastore, if it was set to the unavailable storage.
4. Move the saved volumes to the default datastore.
5. Add the virtual machine back to the VPG, and configure the virtual machine volumes to use the saved volumes as preseeded volumes.
6. Save the VPG definition with the new settings.
The VPG will undergo a Delta Sync before returning to a Meeting SLA status.
To enable protection to continue when journal storage will be unavailable:
1. Delete the VPG but check Keep target disks at the peer site. Checking this option means that the target replica disks for the virtual machines are kept so that you can preseed to these disks so the synchronization is faster.
2. Recreate the VPG, specifying the journal storage you want to use in the and the default recovery storage.
3. Add the virtual machine to the VPG, and configure the virtual machine volumes to use the saved volumes as preseeded volumes.
4. Save the VPG definition with the new settings.
The VPG will undergo a Delta Sync before returning to a Meeting SLA status.