The idea of changing a Placeholder Datastore in SRM has come up a few times in internal discussions recently and there was some confusion around how to deal with it so I wanted to put something together to clarify things.
As a quick refresher, Placeholder Datastores are used to contain the Placeholder VM files at the recovery site. If you intend to do a Planned Migration and Reprotect you will need Placeholder Datastore(s) at the protected site as well.
Here is the process for changing the Placeholder Datastore(s) at the recovery site. The process is the same for the protected site.
Open SRM and navigate to Sites (select the desired site) > Placeholder Datastores
Select Configure Placeholder Datastore, chose the Datastore you would like to change to and click OK
Navigate to the current Placeholder Datastore, select the current Placeholder VMs and Storage vMotion them to the datastore you selected in the previous step
You may see this warning because you are moving the Placeholder VMs and they are a component of SRM. Click Yes to proceed
In the SRM console select Remove Placeholder Datastore, select the datastore you would like to remove and click OK
You will see this warning. Take note of what it says and click Yes
That’s it. You added a new Placeholder Datastore, moved your placeholder VMs to it and removed the old Placeholder Datastore. Going forward, for any VMs you add to protection groups the Placeholder VMs will be created on your new datastore.
A big “thank you!” to my colleagues Lee Dilworth, Ben Meadowcroft and Aleksey Pershin for doing all the hard work for this post.
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