DR Site Licensing

[donnelb1]

Apologies for the question, I have reviewed older posts and online documentation for some time and found a lot of directly contradictory information and I can't confirm with from I read here vSphere Replication Licensing

I have a production site with essentials plus, and a DR site with essentials. Will this allow me to do unidirectional replication or do I need two essential plus licenses? The DR site will not be used for testing, only for DR where the main site is down. In the case were the main site is restored and fallback is necessary the licenses would be swapped to protect and replicate the DR VMs back to production. Similar to the advice here https://core.vmware.com/resource/site-recovery-manager-faq#section4 under section "After failover, what are the license requirements for failback?".

[donnelb1]

Another way of asking, do you need vsphere replication licensing to be a replication target for another site that is protected and licensed?

The replication licensing is very clear that replication will be turned off if you move a VM to a vcenter without the necessary license, but is not clear if that means you need the replication feature at the DR site to receive replication.

"If you configure a virtual machine for a replication on a host with the correct vSphere license and move it to a host with an unsupported license, vSphere Replication stops the replication of that virtual machine. You can disable vSphere Replication on a configured virtual machine on the unlicensed host."