Modern Nutanix Disaster Recovery (Leap) relies on " Categories " to automate the inclusion of virtual machines into Protection Policies and Recovery Plans. When a Protection Policy is created, it is typically applied to a category (e.g., AppType:SQL) rather than individual VM names.

In this scenario, the newly deployed VMs were missed during a test failover despite other VMs on the same cluster recovering successfully. The most likely root cause is that the application team, working independently, failed to assign the required categories to the new VMs during the provisioning process. Because the VMs lacked the correct category tags, the Nutanix Protection Policy did not " see " them, and consequently, no recovery points were ever created for them. This is a common operational failure in environments where " infrastructure as code " or strict provisioning standards are not enforced. Recovery Plans (Option A) do not need manual re-synchronization for new VMs if the categories are correctly mapped. While an initial sync is required (Option D), it would typically show a task or progress rather than just leaving the VMs " missing " from the entire protection summary. Therefore, verifying category assignment is the primary troubleshooting step.