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just70
Contributor
Contributor

SRM 8.1 and VMWare Tools on protected VMs

Hello!

I'm looking to update our Site Recovery Manager to 8.1. I noticed at the bottom of the Compatibility Matrices for VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.1 page it says Site Recovery Manager 8.1 requires VMware Tools 10.1 and later written in red. I haven't seen a SRM compatibility matrix call out a necessary VMware Tools version like this before.

Is anyone running SRM 8.1 and protecting VMs with an older version of VMWare tools? We are grossly behind in updating VMWare Tools on our VMs and haven't needed to update vmware tools in the past for SRM to function correctly. I wonder if the VMWare Tools 10.1 or greater is a hard requirement.

-Justin

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burchell99
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

did you ever get an answer on this? Is it just for the IP customization or for pre/post commands or more of an important requirement?

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Daniel_Georgiev
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi,

excerpt from the documentation that should answer your question #burchell99 - (Performing a Planned Migration or Disaster Recovery By Running a Recovery Plan ) "Site Recovery Manager uses VMware Tools heartbeat to discover when a virtual machine is running on the recovery site. In this way, Site Recovery Managercan ensure that all virtual machines are running on the recovery site. VMware Tools are also used to gracefully shutdown the guest operating system of protected virtual machines. For this reason, VMware recommends that you install VMware Tools on protected virtual machines. If you do not or cannot install VMware Tools on the protected virtual machines, you must configure Site Recovery Manager not to wait for VMware Tools to start in the recovered virtual machines and to skip the guest operating system shutdown step."

#just70 - If you look at the Interoperability matrices(VMware Product Interoperability Matrices​ ) you will find that the oldest supported version of VMware Tools is 10.1.0. If you don't upgrade to 10.1.0 probably you'll hit this issue Recovery Plan Times Out While Waiting for VMware Tools.

Hope this helps,

Daniel G.

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jordanovi
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

VMware Tools 10.1 and later is for IP customization only. For heartbeat detection (pre/post power-on commands) you can use any VMTools version as long as it's compatible to the ESX host