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With the placeholder datastore ready, you can create protection groups. Replicated datastore volumes are the foundation that protection groups are built upon. A protection group is effective immediately after being created. Once a VM is protected, it is essentially pinned to the datastore (or datastores) where the .vmx and .vmdk files reside. SRM does not support manually moving files that belong to a virtual machine off a datastore; the VM is not protected or replicated from its original datastore or datastores. Automated Storage DRS (SDRS) and VMware Storage vMotion can be sparingly used with SRM-protected VMs if certain guidelines are followed. See the VMware Site Recovery Manager Administration Guide.