An administrator is planning a scheduled maintenance window that will temporarily interrupt network connectivity between...

Synchronous replication is designed for zero data loss by requiring that every write be acknowledged at both the primary and recovery sites before the application can proceed. This creates a " hard " dependency on the network link between the two clusters . If the network connectivity is interrupted (e.g., during scheduled maintenance), the primary cluster will be unable to receive acknowledgments from the remote site.

By default, if the synchronous link is broken, the primary cluster may pause I/O to the protected VMs to prevent data inconsistency, which would cause the VMs to become unresponsive to users. To prevent this during planned maintenance while ensuring that the VMs stay online at the primary site, the administrator should temporarily transition the protection mode. Changing the Protection Policy from " Synchronous " to " Asynchronous " (Option C) removes the real-time write-mirroring requirement. This allows the VMs to continue serving local I/O independently of the remote site ' s status. While this technically increases the RPO during the maintenance window, it ensures application availability. Once the maintenance is complete and network connectivity is restored, the administrator can change the policy back to Synchronous. The system will then perform a catch-up sync and return to the Zero-RPO state once the data at both sites is identical again. This operational maneuver is a standard best practice for managing " stretched " cluster environments during infrastructure updates.