SRM Customise IP is Broken/Useless

[webigh86]

Has anybody else experienced issues with SRM and customising IPs?

I have 24 VMs which I recover using SRM. When I'm not using the customise IP option, they recover fine besides manually entering their network settings. However when I customise each VM with their appropriate IP settings, the recovery always fails.

I have found the issue to be SRM ignoring the priority groups when it comes to these activities for each VM:

- Configure Storage

- Configure Test Network

- Guest Startup

- Customise IP

- Guest Shutdown

Then the VM priority order actually works from this point for:

- Power On

- Wait for VMware tools

After SRM finishes the "Create Writeable Storage Snapshot" step, it then completes ALL of the steps highlighted in red for every single VM at once! This is causing the cluster to overload and pretty much cause every VM to fail.

VMware have acknowledged this as an issue and suggested I try the work around of using blank steps with a prompt to resolve the issue. However it doesn't fix it. I've successfully ran several recovery jobs using Customise IP with only 3 VMs and it works perfectly because it isn't starting many VMs at once.

I have raised a feature request with VMware however I've been told it is too late to be looked at for the up coming release. So it 'might' be addressed in the following one....if they consider fixing it.

The way I see it at the moment, if customise IP can't even work with 24 VM's (SRM starter pack is 25) then it is completely useless. It's a shame because it was one of the main selling points as to why I picked a VMware + SRM solution.

Has anybody else experienced this issue and if so, do you have a temporary fix for it?

Regards

Leigh

[Aeonus]

I'm having issues just getting the customize IP to work, period. Keep getting VMware tool timeouts and VMware support is frustrating to deal with for SRM issues (delays and non-response from them much of the time).

In regards to your cluster overload scenario, in my research on my own issues I came across this article. Might be relevant.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 Documentation Library

[webigh86]

The timeout issues are a direct cause of starting too many customised VMs at once. What I did was change the number of customised VMs from 24 down to 5 and I had 'some' luck with it then.

The first time I did this, the recovery plan worked fine without any errors.....despite only 5/24 VMs with the right IP details. However the second time I attempted the recovery, it all failed again with timeouts.

I just tried the recovery again now using only 5 VMs with customised IPs and it worked fine. So it seems like abit of hit and miss.

Really would VMware would address this as its really annoying and frustrating.

I would recommend logging a feature/enhancement request with VMware regarding this. I logged one last week, unfortunately the technican said he couldn't tell me what the feature number was for me to pass on as they keep it all internal.

- Leigh