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pdrace
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

VMware tools timeout issue

I'm having a problem with VMware tools not starting in a timely fashion when testing SRM.

I've read the KB article below and have changed both the recovery.customization.Timeout and the recovery.powerOn.Timeoutto to 900 seconds.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=103110...

Despite this when I run a test I am still getting the error Error: Timed out waiting for VMware Tools after 300 seconds for several machines.

I've restarted the services on both sites and even rebooted the servers in both sites and the error persists. I'm fairly certain this is cosmetic, SRM isn't waiting 15 minutes for operations to complete.

What am I missing?

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memaad
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hi,

Are these  windows 2003 machine... also is VMware tools upto date.

Regards

Mohammed Emaad

Mohammed | Mark it as helpful or correct if my suggestion is useful.
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pdrace
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

They are mostly 2008 and mostly are out of date. Some are 2003 that have current tools that are failing.

I don't think that is the issue though since I was able fix a couple of these by changing the time out for the machine directly.

It appears the settings I've changed at the site level are not working as I still get  these errors "Error - Timed out waiting for VMware Tools after 300 seconds".
The problem is that some machines desired final state is Powered off so there's no way to set this at the machine level.

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memaad
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hi,

I think you upgrade the VMware tools on production VM and  do test failover with  increased timeout for Vmware tools set.

Regards

Mohammed

Mohammed | Mark it as helpful or correct if my suggestion is useful.
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pdrace
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I really don't think that will fix the issue. All the vms I set the timeout on manually now work without a tools update.

The problem is the advanced recovery settings don't seem to being applied.

I believe I'm going to have to open a call with VMware.

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nightrider7731
Contributor
Contributor

You may want to check the isolation.tools.setinfo.disable value on the VMs.  If set to true (once was a CIS recommended setting), it will prevent SRM from talking to the VMTools.  This setting caused me issues when SRM would try to reconfigure the VM's network on the recovery side.  Set the value to false.

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pdrace
Hot Shot
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This option isn't set to true. In fact it doesn't even exist on these machines.

The workaround VMware support came up with is to Configure the virtual machines and change the Startup Action to Power on, change the Timeout to wait for VMware tools and save. Then go back into the configuration and change the the Startup Action to Do Not Power On.

This appears to work. I never got an explanation as to why setting the recovery.power.OnTimeout under recovery in Advanced Settings of the site didn't seem to work.

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stewartshea
Contributor
Contributor

Just ran a quick test in one environment and it appears as though the timeout value assigned under the site Advanced properties (recovery.powerOnTimeout) is only used when you initially configure the protection of the VM. If the VM has already been configured, you will need to manually assign the timeout to the particular VM in the Recovery Plan.

A quick method to change the timeouts to many VM's would be to remove protection and then reconfigure protection again with the advanced setting changed for the remote site (a restart of the services is required). This, of course, will make you lose specific VM configurations in the recovery plan and you may need to manually set the timeout for each VM if you have many customizations.

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