Summary: How to exclude disks from VM protection in VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1.
Date: Around 2010
Refactor: 21 April 2025: Checked links and formatting.

We have some VMs that are replicated for Site Recovery Manager but that have disks that are not replicated. We use this for example with some of our database servers which have database dump directories on separate disks. We don't need this data to replicate, so when trying to protect the VM we get an message like this:

Unable to protect VM 'vmname' due to unresolved devices

Fixing this is really easy, just select the protection group and select the “Virtual Machines” tab. Click here the “Configure Protection” option:

Now select the disk which is not replicated and click “Detach”:

Then, click OK, and the VM will be protected: