Linux virtual machine IP customization fails

Products

VMware Live Recovery VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
During IP customization of a Linux virtual machine, triggered during a virtual machine clone operation in vCenter Server or a recovery in vCenter Site Recovery Manager, you experience these symptoms:

The virtual machine has limited or no network connectivity
IP customization is not fully applied and requires further configuration
The vCenter Site Recovery Manager recovery report reports the status of the recovery job as a success, despite the presense of IP connectivity or configuration issues within the guest OS of the recovered virtual machine.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1.x

Cause

IP customization of a Linux Virtual Machine relies on a set of configuration files and OS-level utilities in order to apply the new network configuration. Under certain conditions, those utilities may fail to apply the requested configuration due to specific configuration issues within the guest OS of the virtual machine. These failures are sometimes not detected by vCenter Server and vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Resolution

This is not a VMware issue. These are some known reasons that Linux IP customization to fail:

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) releases earlier than 6.5, if IPv4 is set to DHCP, IP customisation may fail to apply the new static IPv6 configuration. This issue occurs when there is no DHCP server available on the new network. This is a known issue and is resolved in RHEL 6.5. For more information, see the public RedHat Bugzilla article Static IPV4 and IPV6 addresses are not set to interface if DHCPv4 failed for this interface.

Note: In vCenter Site Recovery Manager, such a failure can occur in both test and full recovery.

If using the NetworkManager application within the guest OS, its administration may conflict with or override the customization configuration that is applied by vCenter Server or vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

To work around this issue, disable the NetworkManager application prior to running customization.

Note: When using vCenter Site Recovery Manager, NetworkManager should be disabled inside the virtual machine before initiating a recovery.

Additional Information

For more details on IP customization, see:

Customizing Guest Operating Systems in the vSphere Web Client in the vSphere 5.5 documentation
Customizing IP Properties for Virtual Machines in the SRM 5.5 documentation

For related IP customization issues, see:

IP Customization of SUSE Linux virtual machines with vCenter Site Recovery Manager times out
Guest IP Customization in SRM 5.0.0 fails with the error: Cannot complete customization, possibly due to a scripting runtime error or invalid script parameters