"Replication is already enabled." error when recreating a replication between sites in Cloud Director Availability 4.0

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When creating a replication for a VM that was previously replicated using Cloud Director Availability, the task fails and you see a similar error:

Replication is already enabled.

• The VM is not visible in the Cloud Director Availability portal under existing replications.
• When checking the replication status of the source VM on the ESXi host, you see a similar message:

(vim.fault.ReplicationVmConfigFault) {
   faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,
   faultMessage = <unset>,
   reason = "replicationNotEnabled",
   vmRef = 'vim.VirtualMachine:77'
   msg = "The vSphere Replication configuration of the virtual machine has an issue: Replication is not enabled."
}

• In the Source Replications view of the Replicator in the source site, you see a replication with a VM ID matching the source VM's MORef.
• Deleting the replication from the Source Replications view fails, and you see a similar error:

Replication with id 'H4-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx' was not found.

Environment

VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.x

Cause

This issue occurs when the pairing between the source and destination sites was broken at the time the previous replication was deleted.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, restart the Replicator and Manager services on source site.

Additional Information

For more information, see the Restart the VMware Cloud Director Availability Services section of the VMware Cloud Director Availability documentation.