Unlike vSphere Replication, SRM cannot enable protection on individual virtual machines. All the virtual machines that are hosted on the datastores in a datastore group are protected. Meaning, with SRM, protection is enabled at the datastore group level. This is because, with an array-based replication, the LUNs backing the datastores are replicated. The array doesn't know which VMs are hosted on the datastore. It just replicates the LUN, block by block. So, at the SRM layer, the protection is enabled at the datastore level. In a way, a Protection Group is nothing but a software construct to which datastore groups are added, which in turn includes all the VMs stored on them in the Protection Group.

When creating a Protection Group, you will have to choose the datastore groups that will be included. Keep in mind that you cannot individually select the datastores in a datastore group. If it were ever allowed to do so, then you will have virtual machines with not all of its...