An administrator incorrectly used the " Activate " functionality on the PD to test failover...

In Nutanix Disaster Recovery using Protection Domains (PDs), " Activate " is a high-level command used to promote a remote site to an active state. This is typically reserved for an unplanned failover scenario when the primary site is completely offline. If an administrator mistakenly uses " Activate " for a test instead of the proper " Test Failover " workflow, the secondary cluster will begin treating the replicated snapshots as active, live virtual machines. This process involves promoting the storage and registering the VMs to the local hypervisor.

To return to a steady state where the production cluster is the only active site, the administrator must perform a cleanup on the DR cluster. The " Deactivate " command on the DR cluster serves two main purposes: it changes the Protection Domain status from " Active " back to " Standby " and provides an option to " Destroy VMs " associated with that PD. Choosing to destroy the VMs on the DR cluster is essential to prevent duplicate VM instances or IP address conflicts when production resumes. Simply deleting the VMs manually (Option C) is insufficient because it does not reset the PD ' s metadata status in the Nutanix Cerebro service. By deactivating the PD and destroying the VMs at the DR site, the administrator ensures that the DR site returns to its role as a passive replication target, allowing the primary production cluster to continue its operations without being impacted by the accidental activation.