Failover stops with the error, The parameter is incorrect. (87), during storage preparation on some or all LUNs

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• SRM test and real failovers stop during storage preparation
• You receive this error:
  
  Failed to create snapshots of replica devices for group 'protection-group-999' using array pair 'array-pair-999': Vmacore::SystemException "The parameter is incorrect. " (87)
  
  
• The error occurs before the rescan step. However, if you manually rescan your storage from the ESX host you see that the LUN has been created and presented successfully.

Cause

This error occurs because of a mishandling of the time zone returned by the storage array to the SRA, which leads to an invalid date value that you can see in the logs.

<time>0001-01-01T00:00:00</time>
   

All timestamps earlier than January 1 1970 experience this issue.

Resolution

If you encounter this issue, check with your SRA vendor for a fix. As a workaround you can change the time zone of your storage.

At the time of writing, GMT and UTC are handled correctly, but Central European summer time (CEST) is not.

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:
There is no risk to VMware products by applying this workaround. However, you should check with your storage vendor for any potential impact on the storage side.