SRM Recovery Fails with “prepareFailover” Error Due to Unexpected SRA Failure in EMC SRDF Adapter

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• The Recovery Plan Report confirms that the SRA command failed with the following error:
  “Failed to demote source consistency group 'group_name'. SRA command 'prepareFailover' failed for consistency group 'group_name'. An unexpected error occurred in SRA. Please check the EmcSrdfSra log file for more information on the error.”

Environment

• VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.x
• VMware Site Recovery Manager 9.x

Cause

• The recovery failed due to an issue with the RDF device pairs. Specifically, one or more RDF pairs contained invalid tracks, which prevented the successful execution of the failover operation.
• Log analysis from the SRA logs located at /opt/vmware/support/logs/SRA/sha-***/EmcSrdfSra.log revealed a backtrace that confirmed the presence of invalid tracks on RDF pair (0009C, 00161).
• The following log entries illustrate the issue:

[20250510031801  2540   344 setMarker                       ] _______Backtrace begin_______
[20250510031801  2540  4745 [email protected]] Exit
[20250510031801  2540  4750 [email protected]] Enter
[20250510031801  2540  4759 [email protected]] Exit
[20250510031801  2540  4565 [email protected]] Exit
[20250510031801  2540  3929 [email protected]] None of the RDF pairs are in [SyncInProg]
[20250510031801  2540  3944 [email protected]] Exit
[20250510031801  2540  3618 [email protected]] The RDF pair (0009C, 00161) is in [Suspended] state
[20250510031801  2540  3628 [email protected]] num_device_pairs_in_reqd_state [1] = [1] num_device_pairs_checked
[20250510031801  2540  3646 [email protected]] Some of the RDF device pairs within the DG [group_name] are in [Suspended] state
[20250510031801  2540  3687 [email protected]] Exit
[20250510031801  2540  4766 [email protected]] Enter
[20250510031801  2540  4786 [email protected]] [WARNING]: The RDF pair (0009C, 00161) has [91137] local R2 invalid tracks and [18] remote R1 invalid tracks
[20250510031801  2540  4825 [email protected]] Exit
[20250510031801  2540  5065 [email protected]         ] [WARNING]: There are invalid tracks present on atleast one RDF pair.
[20250510031801  2540  6950 [email protected]] Enter
[20250510031801  2540  5187 [email protected]] Enter
[20250510031801  2540  5408 [email protected]] Exit
[20250510031801  2540  6954 [email protected]] Performing RDF [RESUME -FORCE] on DG [group_name]
[20250510031801  2540  6957 [email protected]] Performing SymDgRdfControl() for the RDF action [RESUME -FORCE]
[20250510031801  2540  7030 [email protected]] Performing SymDgRdfControl() RESUME -FORCE for the RDF group [group_name]
[20250510031801  2540   344 setMarker                       ] _______Backtrace end_______
[20250510031801  2540  5072 [email protected]         ] [ERROR]: Failed to perform RDF [RESUME -FORCE] operation. Exiting with failure.

 

Resolution

To resolve this issue, further investigation is required in coordination with Dell Support, as the failure is related to invalid tracks on the RDF device pair, which cannot be processed correctly by Site Recovery Manager during the failover operation.

Refer to the following Dell Technologies article for additional guidance on addressing invalid track conditions in SRM environments:

Failed Disaster recovery due to invalid tracks