I am trying to set up vsphere replication on several systems that have attached vRDMs. I am not certain about how this should be done, but have tried different ways, and have not been successful in setting this up. My other VMs are actively replicating, so I know my basic setup is working. I have not been able to locate any documentation related to this, so any info would be greatly appreciated.
Hi, vSphere Replication supports replication of RDMs which are mapped in Virtual Compatibility only. RDMs which are mapped in Physical Compatibility mode cannot be replicated. When you setup replication for VM which has an RDM disk (and you are not using pre-seeded disks on the target site to speed up the initial sync), you will have new vmdk file created for the RDM disk and it will get replicated as normal vmdk file (not RDM) on the target site. Could you please give more details on your setup and what problems/errors you are facing? Thanks.
Thanks for the response Biliana. I was able to get replication working for all of my vRDM systems except one. When I looked at the vmkernel.log I saw this message Failed to establish connection to [ip address]:31031(groupID=GID-9eb07c07-48cd-47a5-911c-5701b111b79f): The set of disks on the replication server doesn't match. I googled this and found 1 lone post that someone else had made with this exact same message. The other persons post spoke about using Net App and mbralign breaking the replication. Although we don't use Net App, the failure message was the same, so I started looking at the disk sizes. It turned out that the vmdk file that was being generated on my target site was 512MB smaller than the one on the source site. There is a VMware bug report on this. I opened a support ticket with VMware, and one of their skilled engineers helped to resize the destination file and get the replication working. I am still not sure of the cause.... I am speculating that it is because the vRDM lun was created from a snapshot of a SAN lun and when the snapshot was taken it somehow changed the partition alignment.
I see, thanks for the update.
