HCX - Port-group will be set as "None" post reverse DR recovery

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

Identify a known issue with HCX reverse DR protection and how to recover that.

Symptoms:
During HCX DR Recovery, the reverse DR protected VM (from Cloud to Onprem) will have vNIC/Port-Group set to NONE.
In some cases, port-group may get assigned to the VM post HCX reverse DR recovery (from Cloud to Onprem), but the vNIC won't be CONNECTED.

Cause

HCX DR feature can be used to protect workload VMs from Onprem to Cloud, known as forward protection.
Post recover of the VM at Cloud, the same VM can be reverse protected from Cloud to Onprem depending upon user requirements.

Note: Reverse protection can be enabled in two ways:

1. Click on an existing forward protected VM and select "Reverse". It will pass the replication id from UI and there won't be an option to override any configuration from UI.
2. Post forward protection recovery, cleanup forward protected VM record from DR wizard and re-configure reverse protection for the same VM (from Cloud to Onprem) by providing all configurations manually as input.

In current HCX DR port-mapping workflows, when reverse protection gets enabled for an existing forward protected VM where existing replication configurations will be re-used, we do not get any network mapping information from backend for the destination DVPG segment (at Onprem), as a result the destination port-group will be set to none.

Resolution

This issue has been fixed in HCX 4.8.0 version.

Workaround:
Below steps can be used to remediate port-group association for the workload VM post reverse DR recovery:

• Once the VM has been recovered and instantiated successfully on Onprem side, assign the required port-group manually using vCenter UI for the given workload VM.

Alternatively,

• Do not re-use the existing forward protection configuration for the VM to enable reverse protection.
• Recover the VM after forward protection has been completed and cleanup DR records using UI.
• Create a new reverse protection record for the same VM (from Cloud to Onprem) similar to a forward protection instance.

 

 

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:

• The network connectivity of VM post HCX forward DR protection recovery won't be affected.
• This issue is applicable when a VM gets reverse protected using existing forward protection where existing replication configurations are re-used.
• Reverse recovery workflow won't be affected for an existing forward protection. Only port-group will be set to None post recovery.
• When a native cloud VM gets DR reverse protected from Cloud to Onprem, there won't be any impact to port-group association during recovery, because all configurations will be provided by user manually which won't have any issues during port-group resolution.