You were right about it. It turned out that the published commands to validate the partnership and replications just aren't enough to reveal the hidden problem. And there were problems with trust. A case was opened with VMware and I need to say their top tier support was awesome, knowledgeable and dedicated to fix the issue. In case somebody else is having the similar issue, may have to reach out to the support to get this fixed. The tools / scripts they use to have this fixed aren't available publicly.