Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > Dell PowerStore: VMware Site Recovery Manager Best Practices > Creating placeholder datastores
If not completed, create a small VMFS datastore at the disaster recovery site as a placeholder for VM configuration files. For each protected virtual machine, SRM creates a shadow VM at the recovery site. This VM serves as a placeholder for CPU, memory, and network resources required to perform a test, disaster recovery, or planned-migration plan.
Although this datastore must only be large enough to hold the configuration files for all the recoverable virtual machines, creating a standard-sized 500 GB datastore will suffice. PowerStore thinly provisions the volume, making this a space-efficient standard.
Note: The minimum PowerStore volume size is 1 MB. The minimum VMFS volume size is 2 GB. However, for practical reasons, the placeholder datastore should be at least 5 GB or larger. A smaller datastore will likely trigger ongoing vSphere datastore capacity alarms in the vSphere Client UI.
Typically, only one placeholder datastore per site is required. This is because the disaster recovery and migration processes unregister and reregister the recovered virtual machine with the .vmx file on the recovered volume. The placeholder volume does not need to be replicated or protected because VMware SRM places only transient data on this volume that can be easily regenerated within the UI.