Error: "Invalid virtual machine configuration" during failback using VMware Live Site Recovery

Products

• VMware Live Recovery
• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Failback fails after a successful failover and Reprotect
• Error while failback

Invalid virtual machine configuration

• The error is encountered during VM reconfiguration during power on
• The configuration of the two sites are not similar:

1. 1. Resource - Different number of resource clusters
   2. Storage Policy - Different names given to different storage policies or different storage policies due to resource constraints or VASA provider limitations

• After a failure the Recovery Plan never recovers and a DB surgery needs to be performed to delete the entries from the SRM database
• This is a vSAN environment

Validation:

• vmware-dr logs for the failure will have entries similar to:

2025-01-30T11:25:08.090+05:30 verbose vmware-dr[12955] [SRM@6876 sub=PropertyCollector opID=ff2b34e8-d8c7-44e5-a1f7-55c7ccc8038c-waitForUpdatesEx] GUReq complete: _state = 3, _baseVersion = 12, _truncatedVersion = -1, _wait = true, _maxUpdates = 100, len(_triggeredFilters) = 0_result.version = 13, len(_result.filterSet) = 1
2025-01-30T11:25:08.511+05:30 error vmware-dr[12943] [SRM@6876 sub=RemoteTask.task-1165431 opID=bddf9dc4-d523-4b76-b243-aa61e33db296-failover:d4d4:d847:3e02:9c16:2373 tid=task-1165431.VirtualMachineReconfigure] The remote task 'vim.Task:eba6ee83-faab-46bf-93bc-1e1b03b373f9:task-1165431' failed:
--> (vim.fault.InvalidVmConfig) {
-->    faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,
-->    faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) [
-->       (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) {
-->          key = "vob.vsan.clomd.needMoreFaultDomains2",
-->          arg = (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) [
-->             (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) {
-->                key = "1",
-->                value = "3"
-->             },
-->             (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) {
-->                key = "2",
-->                value = "1"
-->             }
-->          ],
-->          message = "There are currently 3 usable fault domains. The operation requires 1 more usable fault domains."
-->       }
-->    ],
-->    property = "config.vmProfile"
-->    msg = "Invalid virtual machine configuration."
--> }

 

 

Environment

VMware Live Site Recovery

VMware vSAN

Cause

The issue is caused due to the mismatch in mappings

• In the figure above, DC-CLUS and DC-CLUS1 are both mapped to DR-vSAN-Cluster
• However, there is only one reverse mapping possible from DR-vSAN Cluster
• This means that while failback from the DR site, SRM will only chose one cluster to power on the VM - DC-CLUS1 in this example
• If the VM is not able to get resources which it is configured for, the failback operation will exit with the above error

 

• In the figure above, there are two policies - one for DC-CLUS and another for DC-CLUS1, in the protected site
• New vSAN cluster policy is FTT 1 RAID 1, while vSAN Default Storage Policy is FTT 2 RAID 5 in the protected site
• vSAN Default Storage Policy in the recovery site is FTT1 RAID 1 

Note - The above is just an example - There may be different dissimilar configurations

Resolution

• A similar environment is necessary to ensure automated failover and failback
• The best way to avoid this situation is to have similar environments in both protected and recovery sites

Workaround:

• Protect VMs in such a way so that the mappings are 1:1
• In the above example, a valid workaround would be to move all protected VMs to one cluster in the protected site

 

Additional Information

Site Recovery Manager Administration