Recreating a missing virtual machine disk descriptor file of a replicated VM on the DR side

Products

• VMware Live Recovery
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

After replicating a VM from Production site to DR site virtual machine disk descriptor is missing

Environment

VMware vSphere Replication 8.x
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 8.x

Resolution

Follow Recreating a missing VMware virtual machine disk descriptor file (.vmdk) to create a descriptor file at the DR site


When you get to step 8 to edit the descriptor file, you will also need to make the below additional changes (IN RED) so that it doesn't error out while failing back to the production site 
The text in red for the DR descriptor needs to match the Prod descriptor. If the UUIDs don't match on both replication will fail due to a UUID mismatch.
 

Prod descriptor

DR descriptor

# Disk DescriptorFile version=3 encoding="UTF-8" CID=c19e89b9 parentCID=ffffffff isNativeSnapshot="no" createType="vmfs" # Extent description RW 62914560 VMFS "VM_name-flat.vmdk" # Change Tracking File changeTrackPath="VM_name-ctk.vmdk" # The Disk Data Base #DDB ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic" ddb.deletable = "true" ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "0" ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "0" ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "0" ddb.geometry.cylinders = "3916" ddb.geometry.heads = "255" ddb.geometry.sectors = "63" ddb.longContentID = "6926d44c0ed53242d55f5a8dc19e89b9" ddb.toolsVersion = "9344" ddb.uuid = "xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx-yy xx xx xx xx xx 9e 06" ddb.virtualHWVersion = "8"

# Disk DescriptorFile version=3 encoding="UTF-8" CID=92ca8696 parentCID=ffffffff isNativeSnapshot="no" createType="vmfs" # Extent description RW 62914560 VMFS "VM_name-flat.vmdk" # Change Tracking File changeTrackPath="VM_name-ctk.vmdk" # The Disk Data Base #DDB ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic" ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "0" ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "0" ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "0" ddb.geometry.cylinders = "3916" ddb.geometry.heads = "255" ddb.geometry.sectors = "63" ddb.longContentID = "31f3b5f2da42fcbf2144cd7892ca8696" ddb.toolsVersion = "9344" ddb.uuid = "xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx-yy xx xx xx xx xx 9e 06" ddb.virtualHWVersion = "10"

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:
VM won't power on after failover