IP Customization SRM 8.5

[mathewdsa]

I have the following in my environment.

• 4 vCenters on 7.03 with Enhanced Linked Mode
• SRM and replication are v8.5 between 2 of these vCenters
• Sites are paired and vSphere and Array based replication are both working
• Linux failovers are working in both directions
• Most significant recent change was moving to Photon from Windows SRM on 8.3. That worked and we then started having IP customization errors during the recovery phase
• The 8.5 upgrade was done at VMWare's suggestion to maintain compatibility with vSphere 7

Here is the exact behavior: Recovery starts, VM Shuts down, Storage syncs and connects to the hosts on the recovery site and the VM Boots. Then the problem starts. The VM sits in the IP Customization step for the entire timeout period and then fails and SRM shuts it back down.

Pic attached but it says "Failed to authenticate with the guest operating system with the supplied credentials"

We took of the antivirus to test and it's still the same.

VMWare suggested LSDOCTOR but the diagnostic results came back saying no issues found.

Any help will be greatly appreciated on this. Thanks

[patatr]

Hi I had similar issues. And for me there were two solutions. 

One problem was based on NTP issue - Windows Server was not syncing the clock. And there was a significant mismatch between what time is in SRM, ESXi and VM. 

The second one was quite recent. The VM General options were pointing that VM is Windows based when in reality it was Linux-based (vSphere setting) Somebody made a mistake when creating VM from scratch and selected the wrong OS. SRM during IP customization was trying to use Linux authentication instead Windows. 

[jordanovi]

Hi 

You can check the VGAuth service logs inside the guest VMs for more info

• Windows OS: C:\windows\temp\vmware-imc\ or %SystemRoot%\Temp\vmware-imc\
• Linux OS: var/log/vmware-imc/..

Also, you can try to enable debug log level - see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1007873

Hope this helps

Ivan