5.5
Table Of Contents
- Site Recovery Manager Administration
- Contents
- About VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Administration
- SRM Privileges, Roles, and Permissions
- Replicating Virtual Machines
- How the Recovery Point Objective Affects Replication Scheduling
- Replicating a Virtual Machine and Enabling Multiple Point in Time Instances
- Configure Replication for a Single Virtual Machine
- Configure Replication for Multiple Virtual Machines
- Replicate Virtual Machines By Using Replication Seeds
- Reconfigure Replications
- Stop Replicating a Virtual Machine
- Creating Protection Groups
- Creating, Testing, and Running Recovery Plans
- Testing a Recovery Plan
- Performing a Planned Migration or Disaster Recovery By Running a Recovery Plan
- Differences Between Testing and Running a Recovery Plan
- How SRM Interacts with DPM and DRS During Recovery
- How SRM Interacts with Storage DRS or Storage vMotion
- How SRM Interacts with vSphere High Availability
- Protecting Microsoft Cluster Server and Fault Tolerant Virtual Machines
- Create, Test, and Run a Recovery Plan
- Export Recovery Plan Steps
- View and Export Recovery Plan History
- Cancel a Test or Recovery
- Delete a Recovery Plan
- Reprotecting Virtual Machines After a Recovery
- Restoring the Pre-Recovery Site Configuration By Performing Failback
- Customizing a Recovery Plan
- Recovery Plan Steps
- Specify the Recovery Priority of a Virtual Machine
- Creating Custom Recovery Steps
- Types of Custom Recovery Steps
- How SRM Handles Custom Recovery Steps
- Create Top-Level Command Steps
- Create Top-Level Message Prompt Steps
- Create Command Steps for Individual Virtual Machines
- Create Message Prompt Steps for Individual Virtual Machines
- Guidelines for Writing Command Steps
- Environment Variables for Command Steps
- Customize the Recovery of an Individual Virtual Machine
- Customizing IP Properties for Virtual Machines
- Advanced SRM Configuration
- Configure Protection for a Virtual Machine or Template
- Configure Resource Mappings for a Virtual Machine
- Specify a Nonreplicated Datastore for Swap Files
- Recovering Virtual Machines Across Multiple Hosts on the Recovery Site
- Resize Virtual Machine Disk Files During Replication Using Replication Seeds
- Resize Virtual Machine Disk Files During Replication Without Using Replication Seeds
- Reconfigure SRM Settings
- Change Local Site Settings
- Change Logging Settings
- Change Recovery Settings
- Change Remote Site Settings
- Change the Timeout for the Creation of Placeholder Virtual Machines
- Change Storage Settings
- Change Storage Provider Settings
- Change vSphere Replication Settings
- Modify Settings to Run Large SRM Environments
- Troubleshooting SRM Administration
- Limitations to Protection and Recovery of Virtual Machines
- SRM Events and Alarms
- vSphere Replication Events and Alarms
- Collecting SRM Log Files
- Access the vSphere Replication Logs
- Resolve SRM Operational Issues
- SRM Doubles the Number of Backslashes in the Command Line When Running Callouts
- Powering on Many Virtual Machines Simultaneously on the Recovery Site Can Lead to Errors
- LVM.enableResignature=1 Remains Set After a SRM Test Failover
- Adding Virtual Machines to a Protection Group Fails with an Unresolved Devices Error
- Configuring Protection fails with Placeholder Creation Error
- Planned Migration Fails Because Host is in an Incorrect State
- Recovery Fails with a Timeout Error During Network Customization for Some Virtual Machines
- Recovery Fails with Unavailable Host and Datastore Error
- Reprotect Fails with a vSphere Replication Timeout Error
- Recovery Plan Times Out While Waiting for VMware Tools
- Reprotect Fails After Restarting vCenter Server
- Rescanning Datastores Fails Because Storage Devices are Not Ready
- Scalability Problems when Replicating Many Virtual Machines with a Short RPO to a Shared VMFS Datastore on ESXi Server 5.0
- Application Quiescing Changes to File System Quiescing During vMotion to an Older Host
- Reconfigure Replication on Virtual Machines with No Datastore Mapping
- Configuring Replication Fails for Virtual Machines with Two Disks on Different Datastores
- vSphere Replication RPO Violations
- vSphere Replication Does Not Start After Moving the Host
- Unexpected vSphere Replication Failure Results in a Generic Error
- Generating Support Bundles Disrupts vSphere Replication Recovery
- Recovery Plan Times Out While Waiting for VMware Tools
- Index
Solution
Install VMware Tools on the protected virtual machines. If you do not or cannot install VMware Tools on
the protected virtual machines, you must configure SRM not to wait for VMware Tools to start in the
recovered virtual machines and to skip the guest operating system shutdown step. See “Change Recovery
Settings,” on page 85.
Reprotect Fails After Restarting vCenter Server
After you restart vCenter Server, when you use vSphere Replication, reprotect operations sometimes fail.
Problem
After you restart vCenter Server, when you use vSphere Replication, reprotect operations fail with the error
Error - Unable to reverse replication for the virtual machine
'virtual_machine'. The session is not authenticated.
Cause
After vCenter Server restarts, it fails to refresh some sessions that SRM uses to communicate with
vSphere Replication and causes reprotect to fail.
Solution
Restart the SRM services on both of the sites.
Rescanning Datastores Fails Because Storage Devices are Not Ready
When you start a test recovery or a recovery, some SRAs send responses to SRM before a promoted storage
device on the recovery site is available to the ESXi hosts. SRM rescans the storage devices and the rescan
fails.
Problem
If storage devices are not fully available yet, ESXi Server does not detect them and SRM does not find the
replicated devices when it rescans. This can cause several problems.
n
Datastores are not created and recovered virtual machines cannot be found.
n
ESXi hosts become unresponsive to vCenter Server heartbeat and disconnect from vCenter Server. If
this happens,vCenter Server sends an error to SRM and a test recovery or real recovery fails.
n
The ESXi host is available, but rescanning and disk resignaturing exceed the SRM or vCenter Server
timeouts, resulting in an SRM error.
Cause
The storage devices are not ready when SRM starts the rescan.
Solution
To delay the start of storage rescans until the storage devices are available on the ESXi hosts, increase the
storageProvider.hostRescanDelaySec setting to a value between 20 and 180 seconds. See “Change Storage
Provider Settings,” on page 87.
NOTE In SRM 5.1 and earlier, you might have used the storageProvider.hostRescanRepeatCnt parameter to
introduce a delay in recoveries. Use the storageProvider.hostRescanDelaySec parameter instead.
Site Recovery Manager Administration
118 VMware, Inc.