SRM 5.5 - vSphere replication - Error: Unable to reverse replication for the Virtual Machine. A snapshot operation cannot be performed

[cluey]

Hi all, we have just run a test DR failover of a couple of VMs in our protected site to our failover site and all failed over perfectly, both VMs came online and all applications working well. However when we cam to r-eprotect the VMs we're getting a couple of errors.

One of the VMs seems to have gone through the reprotect process fine, it's still running but hasn't moved off 89% for some time. The VM does have a couple of large (just under 2 TB) VMDKs. is the slow progress just a direct result of the large VMDKs?

More worrying though is the other VM which won't reprotect at all. It generates an error each time I click the 'Reprotect' button (Error: Unable to reverse replication for the Virtual Machine. A snapshot operation cannot be performed).

Does anyone have any ideas as to the cause?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Andy

[cluey · Accepted solution]

Finally got to the bottom of this. The issue was that the SRM reprotect job was attempting to clear up any snapshots that had been taken on the destination VM object within VMWare, but was failing to clean the snapshots up.

The reason why the snapshots wouldn't consolidate was because these were Temporary VEEAM snapshots which didn't actually have any snapshot file listed in the VSAN datastore. So when we searched through the Datastore browser, no snapshot file existed in the VMs folder. Attempting a manual delete also failed.

To sort this we created a snapshot of the VM in the original Datacentre (note this is the powered down VM), this had the effect of getting rid of the 'stale' Snapshot that was visible in Snapshot manager that VEEAM backup had left behind. Once this was gone, the reprotect back to DCA worked perfectly.