When you initiate the reprotect process, Site Recovery Manager instructs the underlying storage arrays or vSphere Replication to reverse the direction of replication
This is very interesting to know, yet it appears that is not what happened in my case. At least I don't have anything in my replication logs to indicate this reverse replication took place. Perhaps I have an issue with my VSphere replication configuration?
When creating placeholder virtual machines on the new protected site, Site Recovery Manager uses the location of the original protected virtual machine to determine where to create the placeholder virtual machine. Site Recovery Manager uses the identity of the original protected virtual machine to create the placeholder and any subsequent recovered virtual machines.
This describes my exact situation so I am still unclear why the re-protect did not work, and why the VMWare engineer's instructions contradict this information.
If the original protected virtual machines are no longer available, Site Recovery Manager uses the inventory mappings from the original recovery site to the original protected site to determine the resource pools and folders for the placeholder virtual machines. You must configure inventory mappings on both sites before running reprotect, or reprotect might fail.
But this is not what I am experiencing. When I run the planned migration the original, protected virtual machine is simply powered down yet the VM is left in place. So the original protected vm is in fact available.
Also I sincerely appreciate the clarifications, but I am concerned by what appears to be conflicting information out there.