Unable to protect vm with NVMe controller in VCDA

Products

• VMware Cloud Director Availability - Disaster Recovery 4.x

Issue/Introduction

During custom tenant recovery test, it is found that all the Windows test VM could not be protected by VCDA, while all Linux test VM could be protected successfully.

Below error display in VCDA portal:

"Operation canceled due to an unexpected error"

No error found in both VCD and vCenter sides.

Environment

vCloud Director Availability 4.7

vCloud Director 10.5.1

vCenter 7.0 U3

Cause

After comparing the setting of test Windows VM and Linux VM, only Windows VM attached one NVMe controller by default while none on Linux VM.

After removing the NVMe controller from Windows vm, the VCDA protection succeed.

Clearly the failure is related to NVMe support on VCDA.

Resolution

Below list the requirements on NVMe in VCDA:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director-Availability/4.7/VMware-Cloud-Director-Availability-User-Guide/GUID-1A28D7BE-DABB-4544-AB6E-F6D7B2F4EBD9.html?hWord=N4IghgNiBcICYEsDOBrABAFwBYIHYgF8g

"

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe)To replicate virtual machines with an NVMe disk controller, VMware Cloud Director Availability requires that both the source and the destination sites run vCenter Server 7.0 U2 or later.

"

But both source and dest vCenter fulfill the version requirement.

Finally it is confirmed that the source Esxi version on customer site is 7.0 U2 GA, this is the reason why the NVMe attached vm could not be protected via VCDA.