Delay in discovery during SRM reprotect due to cosmetic error message

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
Since SRM does not wait for storage side device discovery to complete before it triggers sync request during Reprotect operation, in environments with large number of storage devices this process can result in a harmless/cosmetic error message caused by a delay in device discovery process.

You see an error message similar to:

Error - Failed to sync data on replica devices. A specified parameter was not correct: deviceGroup"

Environment

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 8.x

Cause

• Sync task after Reprotect operation does not serve any purpose except to kick off first sync between sites after Reprotect task is done.
• SRM's Reprotect and Failover functionalities are NOT impacted in any way by the observed error message. It is completely harmless for the Reprotect and subsequent Failover operations.
• One cannot initialize another Reprotect task after seeing this error event, because previous Reprotect task has already been successful and cannot be repeated.
• Failover operation, when triggered, will initiate its own sync task (regardless of the status of the one triggered as part of reprotect operation) and ensure that all data is replicated to the other site before continuing with the process.
• This behavior is not specific to any storage model/vendor in particular and depends solely on time required for storage side to discover device operation to be completed.

Resolution

This error is purely cosmetic and harmless in nature, which has no impact to the SRM, SRA or Storage Array functionality.