The Problem
A colleague of mine has been doing some data centre failover testing for a customer recently and ran into an issue with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.8 running on vSphere 5.5 U2. When attempting to perform a recovery, and you’re running Linked Mode, and the protected site is off-line, the recovery may fail. The upshot of this is “The user is unable to perform a recovery at the recovery site, in the event of a DR scenario”. Here’s what it looks like.
The Reason and Resolution
You can read more about the problem in this VMware KB article: Performing a Recovery using the Web Client in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.8 reports the error: Failed to connect Site Recovery Manager Server(s). In short, there’s a PowerShell script you can run to make the recovery happen.
Conclusion
I don’t know what to say about this. I’d like to put the boot into whomever at VMware is responsible for this SNAFU, but I’m guessing that they’ve already had a hard time of it. At least, I guess, there’s a workaround, if not a fix. But you’d be a bit upset if this happened for the first time during a real failover. But that’s why we test before we handover. And what is it with everything going pear-shaped when Linked Mode is in use?
*Update – 29/10/2015*
Marcel van den Berg recently pointed out that updating to SRM 5.8.1 resolves this issue. Further detail can be found here.
