\uD83E\uDD14 Problem
The VM Start Protection task fails with a time out error.
\uD83C\uDF31 Solution
The above error can occur if there is a communication issue between the DRVA and ESXi CIM daemon.
Check under the Protected Domains tab and within the MSA logs to see if there are any CIM-related errors.
We can see there is communication failure which needs to be corrected by restarting CIM services on ESXi hosts.
Restart CIM service from all ESXi hosts in cluster.
Start VM protection again.
In the above example we can see there is communication failure that should be corrected by restarting CIM services on the ESXi hosts. To fix this problem:
Restart the CIM service for all ESXi hosts in the cluster.
Try starting VM Protection again.
ESXi 6.7 has CIM related issues and most of these are not seen in ESXi 7.0 & later.