Error : ""The source virtual machine has been deleted or it cannot be found" observed on replicating virtual machines

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Some of the VMs reported "Not Active (RPO Violation)" state.
  
  
• All of these VMs showed the error as:
  "The source virtual machine has been deleted or it cannot be found"
  
  
• These VMs were removed from vCenter inventory with respective replication jobs still active in vSphere Replication environment.
  
  
• Removing and re-adding of these VMs fail with following error:
  
  Operation Failed
A generic error occurred in the vSphere Replication Management Server. Exception details: "Cannot invoke "com.vmware.hms.replication.capabilities.ReplicationCapa
bilities.isSupportsPreserveReplicaDisksOnUnconfigure("because "capabilities" is null'.
Operation ID : #######-####-####-####-###########


• Restart of vSphere Replication services failed to resolve the issue.

Environment

vSphere Replication 8.x

vSphere Replication 9.x

Cause

Issue caused by affected VMs being removed from vCenter inventory and added back while its replication jobs still running.

With this re-adding of VMs in vCenter, the UUID of these VMs changes and subsequently their replication jobs become invalid throwing above stated error.

Resolution

VRMS database of both vSphere Replication Appliances need to be cleaned up for the entries of these VMs.

Contact Broadcom Support for assistance in this cleanup process.