Create a plan

This walkthrough covers every step of the protection plan wizard. Open Configure → Protection Plans and click + New to start.

1. General

   Name the plan and pick the Protection Site (source) and Recovery Site (destination).

2. Virtual machines

   Select the VMs to protect — use search for large inventories. With VMware as source, a prompt asks to enable Changed Block Tracking (CBT) on the selected VMs; click Enable CBT (CBT is essential for replication).

3. Recovery configuration

   Provide per-VM settings used to create the instance on the recovery site. Only values available and supported on the target site are offered. The guest OS family and firmware type are auto-detected and can be corrected manually (BIOS, UEFI, UEFISecure, UEFISecurevTPM, UEFIvTPM).

   Key fields by target platform:

   • AWS — tenancy (shared or Dedicated Host with associated AMI), instance type, volume type and IOPS, KMS encryption key, License Manager ARN, tags (with copy-from-source when AWS is also the source). Network: VPC, subnet (AZ auto-detected), auto public IP / Elastic IP, private IP, security groups, or copy network configuration from source.
   • VMware — folder location, compute (ESXi host or cluster), datastore or datastore cluster, vCPU count, memory. Network: port group, adapter type, optional MAC address, and optional static guest IP (IP, subnet mask, gateway, DNS servers).
   • Azure — resource group, availability zone, VM size, volume type, tags, disk access mode (Allow All / Allow Private / Deny All) with disk access key for private mode. Network: virtual network, subnet, private IP, public IP, security groups.
   • GCP — instance type, volume type, metadata tags. Network: network, subnet, private IP, external IP (auto / none / reserved), network tier (Premium or Standard), network tags.

   Use Copy Recovery Configurations to copy the first VM's configuration to other VMs in the plan, selecting which configuration sections to copy.

4. Boot order

   Define the boot order (lower numbers recover first) and the boot delay in seconds between VMs — use this to sequence databases before application tiers.

5. Replication configuration

   Set start time, replication interval (the RPO target), and the transfer options: encryption on wire, compression, dedupe, differential reverse replication, and synchronize-all-VM replication. Advanced per-platform options (Quiesce Guest OS, AWS replication priority, AWS EBS target storage) are described in Replication.

6. Scripts

   Attach plan-level pre/post replication and recovery scripts. Supported runtimes are Shell, Bash, Python 3.x, and Golang; scripts must be executables. Recovery post-scripts receive a JSON document describing each recovered VM (name, source and target platform IDs, assigned IPs, credentials), the user inputs, and the pre-script output. The default script timeout is 300 seconds and can be changed.

   Execution sequence across a recovery operation:

   Phase	Level	Script	Executed
   Replication	Protection plan	Pre-script	First step of each replication iteration.
   Replication	Virtual machine	Pre-script	Before each VM’s snapshot is taken.
   Replication	Virtual machine	Post-script	After the VM’s snapshot completes.
   Replication	Protection plan	Post-script	After all VM snapshots complete.
   Recovery	Protection plan	Pre-script	First step of test/full recovery and migration.
   Recovery	Virtual machine	Pre-script	Before each VM’s recovery starts.
   Recovery	Virtual machine	Post-script	After each VM is recovered.
   Recovery	Protection plan	Post-script	After recovery completes for all VMs.

   Script exit status is captured: a non-zero exit marks the recovery job for that VM or plan as Partially Completed.

7. Point-in-time configuration (optional)

   Enable checkpointing to maintain point-in-time copies usable during recovery:

   Parameter	Type	Required	Description
   Enable Checkpointing	boolean	optional	Turns checkpoint creation on or off for the plan.
   Checkpoint count	number	optional	Number of checkpoints to create per period.
   Every	enum	optional	Period over which the checkpoints are created: days, weeks, months, or years.
   Retain for	duration	optional	How long each checkpoint is retained in the target infrastructure.

   The checkpoint schedule must be consistent with the configured RPO; the wizard shows a configuration summary once it validates. Note the point-in-time limitations for reverse replication.

8. Summary

   Review and click Finish. Replication jobs start for the selected VMs immediately according to the configured start time.

After creation

• Watch the first (full) iteration under Jobs → Replication until each VM reaches init-success. See Status check for the status vocabulary.
• Run a test recovery once the plan is in sync.
• For bulk plan creation from a spreadsheet, see Playbooks.

Related docs

• Protection plans

• Replication

• Run replication

• Recovery testing