Unable to configure protection via Site Recovery Manager for VM with vCPU's over 128+

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

When trying to configure the protection for a VM with vCPU's over 128 you see the following message(s):

within the Protection Groups in SRM:

Placeholder Create Error: No hosts with hardware version '0' and datastore(s) '"xxxxxxxxxx"' which are powered on and not in maintenance mode are available.

'Create virtual machine' error seen on the Disaster Recovery vCenter: Invalid virtual machine configuration. A virtual IOMMU should always be enabled for a VCPU count of more than 128.

Environment

Site Recovery Manager 8.x

vSphere Live Site Recovery 9.x

Cause

The placeholder VM cannot be created on the disaster recovery side due to a VM configuration file error. This occurs because the ESXi host on the disaster recovery side is unable to create a placeholder VM with more than 128 vCPUs

Resolution

If the ESXi host on the DR side is ESXi 8.x +, ensure that the following parameters are present on the source side VM configuration file (.vmx)
vSphere ESXi 8.0 - vGPU support for 128+ vCPUs (Linux Guest)

For AMD CPU:

  amd.iommu.supportsPcip=”TRUE”
  vvtd.enable=“TRUE”
  pciPassthru.vmiop.allowViommu=”TRUE”
  pciPassthru.vmiop.enableViommu=”TRUE”
 
For Intel CPU:

  vvtd.enable=“TRUE”
  pciPassthru.vmiop.allowViommu=”TRUE”
  pciPassthru.vmiop.enableViommu=”TRUE”

If the parameters above are present or disaster recovery side and ESXi host is on 7.x then proceed to enable to the 'replication.createPlaceholderVmWithMinResources' advanced parameter within the advanced settings of both SRM appliances

The 'replication.createPlaceholderVmWithMinResources' parameter allows the ESXi hosts to use minimum CPUs and memory resources when creating a placeholder virtual machine. The placeholder VM will then increase it's vCPUs once the source .vmx file is loaded upon a failover.

To enabled the replication.createPlaceholderVmWithMinResources parameter, use the following steps:

1. In the vSphere Client, click Site Recovery > Open Site Recovery.
2. On the Site Recovery home tab, select a site pair, and click View Details.
3. In the left pane, click Configure > Advanced Settings > Replication.
4. Select a site, and click Edit to change the settings.
5. Enable 'replication.createPlaceholderVmWithMinResources'
6. Configure the protection for the VM once again.