"The selected VM is not ready to be imported..." error when performing a failover in Cloud Director Availability 4.2/4.3

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When performing a failover for a replication, the task fails and you see an error similar to:

Unexpected vCloud Director error. [ UI-########-####-####-####-########b9c8-r2312-vR-4e-########-####-####-####-########c1cf ] The selected VM is not ready to be imported. Try again in a few minutes.

• In the destination vCenter Server, you can see that the recovered virtual machine fails to register in the vCenter inventory.
• In the /var/log/hostd.log file on the destination ESXi host, you see entries similar to:

2022-05-12T17:08:02.557Z verbose hostd[2105953] [Originator@6876 sub=Vmsvc.vm:/vmfs/volumes/vsan:52573622########-######2590000000/########-####-####-####-########000/vmname.vmx opID=########-####-####-####-########000000-HMS-19551-0-01-33-d890 user=vpxuser:VSPHERE.LOCAL\com.vmware.vr-########-####-####-####-########0000] LoadFromConfig message: Unable to load configuration file '/vmfs/volumes/vsan:52573622########-######250000000/########-####-####-####-########0000/vmname.vmx'.
--> File "/vmfs/volumes/vsan:52573622########-######2590000000/########-####-####-####-########000/vmname.vmx" line 100: Variable "ethernet0.startConnected" is already defined.

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.x

Cause

This issue occurs when the source virtual machine's configuration file contains some entries that start with upper case letters which causes the host based replication (HBR) service to duplicate these entries in the recovered .vmx file.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in Cloud Director Availability 4.4.1, available at Broadcom Downloads.

Workaround:
To work around this issue if you do not want to upgrade, ensure that each entry of the source virtual machine's .vmx file beings with a lower case letter.