Changing advanced settings in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Executing a recovery plan or performing a test of a recovery plan can produce a timeout. This article provides information on the most common advanced settings that can be changed to prevent a timeout from occurring.

Resolution

Advanced Settings

To access the advanced settings for Site Recovery Manager (SRM):

1. From the vSphere Client within the Site Recovery Manager Plug-in, select Sites.
2. Right-click the applicable site and click Advanced Settings. The navigation window opens.
3. In the navigation window, select Recovery.
4. Choose the setting that requires modification.
5. Click OK to save settings.
6. Repeat Steps 1 to 5 on the other site as well.
7. Restart the Site Recovery Manager Services on both sites for the changes to take effect.
   

These settings that can affect a recovery plan or testing of a recovery plan within the advanced settings:

• Recovery.calloutCommandLineTimeout – By default, SRM waits 300 Seconds for a command to complete. If a command takes longer than 300 seconds, the step is terminated and the recovery plan fails to complete.
  
  
• Recovery.powerStateChangeTimeout – By default, SRM waits 120 seconds for a virtual machine at the protected site to respond to a power down request when a recovery plan or testing of a recovery plan is initiated. If the request does not complete within the timeout period, the virtual machine is skipped and the next virtual machine is processed and an error is reported for the recovery plan.

SAN Provider Settings

The SAN provider is the direct interface between SRM and your Storage Replication Adaptor (SRA), which is provided by the hardware vendor of your storage array. Some SRAs have a specific requirement to change some of the SAN Provider values to work correctly with SRM. Change these values in accordance with the recommendation from your SAN hardware vendor:

• SanProvider.calloutCommandTimeout – This setting determines how long SRM waits for a command that was issued by the SRA to complete. It is sometimes necessary for SRM to wait a little longer for an SRA command to complete.
  
  
• SanProvider.hostReconnectTimeout – During a recovery plan or test recovery plan, the hosts on the recovery site have to perform a rescan to discover the recovered datastores. It may be necessary to change this value if the hosts on the recovery site are taking a longer period of time to complete the rescan.
  
  
• SanProvider.hostRescanRepeatCount – During a recovery plan or test recovery plan, the hosts on the recovery site have to perform a rescan to discover the recovered datastores. Some storage arrays require more time to present the recovered datastores and a second or third rescan is required to successfully pick up all the recovered datastores.
  
  
• SanProvider.hostRescanTimeoutSec – During a recovery plan or test recovery plan, it may be necessary to change this value to allow SRM to wait longer for a HBA rescan to complete on the recovery site.

Additional Information

For a list of advanced settings available in SRM 5.x, see the relevant SRM Administration Guide in the VMware Documentation Centre.

VMware vCenter Server Site Recovery Manager test failover fails with the error: Unable to recover datastore