vSphere Replication & SRM Issues

12 June 2013 by Craig in SRM, Troubleshooting. Having spent some time working with vSphere Replication I came across a number of issues trying to get my vSphere Replication Appliances to talk to each other and then to get vSphere Replication working. The moral to this blog post is DNS and Networking! DNS Contrary to popular belief the DNS settings in the vSphere Replication Appliance appear to do err nothing. I was receiving the Error Code vSphere Replication Generic Server Error: No Route To Host After confirming my vCenter servers could resolve each other and also my vSphere Replication Appliances (as I had entered in A records for them) and the fact that I could ping everything, I decided to hop straight onto the vSphere Replication Appliances to test they could ping each other directly. This ended in an epic fail as they didnt have any DNS names for each other, so to resolve this I edited the host files on both vSphere Replication Appliances by entering the following commands: vi /etc/hosts i 172.19.144.149 VCT01.domain.local VCT01 172.19.146.149 VCT02.domain.local VCT02 (Press Escape Key) :wq After doing this my vSphere Replication Appliance could ping each other and the connection between the Appliances formed. Networking

When I came to replicate the VMs, a folder would be created for the VM and a VMDK file, however the VMDK would always remain at 0.00KB and when I tried to perform a manual synchronisation, I would receive the helpful error: Call HmsGroup.OnlineSync for object GID on Server failed. An unknown error has occurred. After much head scratching, I realized we have two different default gateways, so I changed the default gateway on the VM which was being protected to the one being used by vSphere Replication, same issue occurred. I then went over all of my default gateways for the following items: 1. vCenter Server 2. vSphere Replication Appliances 3. ESXi Hosts The last one was key, when I changed the default gateway on the ESXi Hosts to match the vSphere Replication Appliances, everything fell into place.