VPG paused with 'VM not found' after VMs are moved to another site outside the VPG; recreate the VPG after the VMs return
Machine-distilled from a resolved support ticket on 2026-09-27. Source ref: c19484c3c941. Verify before relying on it.
Applies to: Zerto on vSphere, general across versions. The equivalent vCloud Director alert is VCD0022.
Symptom: One or more VPGs are paused by the system with the alert that a VM was not found (VPG0049 / EV0077 'Protection group missing VM'). The message says to return the VM to the inventory or edit the VPG to remove it. This happens after the protected VMs were moved away from the source site by a process other than a Zerto failover of that VPG, for example a live migration or failover to another data centre.
Cause: The VPG tracks protected VMs by their hypervisor managed object reference (MoRef ID). When VMs leave the source inventory, the VPG can no longer find them and pauses. When the VMs are later moved or failed back to the original site, they are registered with new MoRef IDs. The existing VPG does not recognise them as the same VMs, so protection does not resume automatically.
Resolution: 1. Confirm with the VM owner whether the missing VMs were intentionally moved or removed from the source inventory. 2. If the VMs are temporarily at another site and will come back, do not expect the paused VPG to resume after they return, because they will have new MoRef IDs. 3. Once the VMs are back in the source inventory, delete the paused VPG, or remove the affected VMs from it, and recreate protection for those VMs. 4. To avoid a full initial sync, you can keep the existing recovery disks and use them as pre-seeded volumes when you recreate the VPG. 5. If the VMs were never moved and are still visible in the inventory, collect Zerto logs and investigate a possible inventory sync issue instead.
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