HCX Bulk or RAV Migration failure with "Error Creating Group"

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

• The initial Bulk Migration or RAV (Replicated Assisted vMotion) was initiated with "Enable Seed Checkpoint", but the migration failed during replication due to space constraint issue's on the  target datastore.
• The migration was re-initiated with using "existing seeds" option which resulted in "Error Creating Group".
• Cleaning up the migration entries from HCX Database does not help. 
• Migration of an another VM's works which rules out HCX-IX issue.
• The app.log on the target HCX Manager located at /common/logs/admin/ shows following entries
  
  2024-06-22 03:12:37.661 UTC [ReplicationTransferService_SvcThread-42023, Ent: HybridityAdmin, , TxId: TxId: 3f35a4c4-2e8c-4ca7-ac16-5a0e4013cbea] ERROR c.v.h.s.r.jobs.SetupTarget- Job (ee0f1d14-b98c-4bb8-8539-3e43508cfxxx) failed with exception java.lang.RuntimeException: Error Creating Group

Environment

HCX

Cause

• The failure is at task "SETUP_TARGET for transfer". 

  2024-06-22 03:09:20.950 UTC [ReplicationTransferService_SvcThread-1395, Ent: HybridityAdmin, , TxId: f44c1c2e-1296-44b6-973d-ca71039289d0] INFO  c.v.h.s.r.j.ReplicationTransferJob- Job (761a5359-a7a1-4a37-a1cd-63b9e9dd7037) Replication transfer job performing work in state:SETUP_TARGET for transfer 07aeb88c-2c86-43c8-9559-dea273129ad5

• The error is possibly due bad seed checkpoint data disks on target datastore which HCX is enable to re-use for "replication".

• Initial sync impacted due any network outage or space issue could effect the integrity of the disk to be used as seeds. 

Resolution

To workaround this issue:

1. Perform a migration job clean up and remove the seed checkpoint disks from target datastore. This would delete the delta disks replicated during the initiate attempt.
2. Re-initiate the migration again with "Enable Seed Checkpoint"

Note: When the job is reinitiated post deletion of delta disks, the base sync start from beginning.