Site Recovery Manager 8.x fails for agent virtual machines on vSphere Cluster Service in vCenter 7.x

Products

• VMware Live Recovery
• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
There is incompatibility when an environment is setup to leverage the vSphere 7.x feature vSphere Cluster Service (vCLS) and Protect the vCLS agent VMs with SRM 8.x
The incompatibility causes SRM planned migration workflows to fail with an error message of "unable to unmount a datastore"
Additionally new protections fail on vCLS with an error "Cannot protect VMware agent VM <VM name>. Move it to a non-replicated datastore"

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x
VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.x

Resolution

This issue is resolved in vSphere 7.0 U1a . 

vCenter Server 7.x and Site Recovery Manager 8.x is an unsupported configuration there are two possible options to relieve this situation:

• Downgrade or rollback the vCenter to a supported version of vSphere; please see the VMware Interoperability Matrix  
• Permanently move the vCLS agent vm with Storage vMotion to a datatstore not protected by SRM and stay in an unsupported configuration, until VMware releases a patch release to address this issue.
  • This VM agent move could be a scripted or manual step taken prior to performing a planed migration workflow; thus removing the vCLS from planed migration protection.

Workaround:
If a situation arrises where the steps in the resolution cannot be taken prior to the planned migration workflow being activated a work around can be achieved:

• In the failed state; storage vMotion the vCLS agent VM to a non-replicated datastore.
• Re run the planned migration; which should now complete without the vCLS agent VM present.