VM Snapshot Failures within VLCR Protected site with multiple vCenters in Linked mode configuration.

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

• Users with multiple vCenters in Linked mode configuration within the same VLCR protected site may experience intermittent snapshot failures for virtual machines.
• Protection Groups (PGs) report failures to snapshot VMs with errors such as "Failed to snapshot VM 'VM name' during stage: performing backup. VixDiskLib_Cleanup failed" and "Failed to login error due to invalid login password".
• Below alerts may be seen in the VLCR UI

  Skipped taking snapshot of protection group Example Protection Group. The group membership query did not match any VMs.

• DR Connectors status show RED and you will see alerts as below 
  
  

Environment

VMware Live Cyber Recovery 9.0.0.11 and above with vCenters in Linked mode within the same Protected site. 

Cause

The upgrade to version 9.0.0.11 introduced a new "service account" login mechanism to replace the deprecated "solution user account. Because the vCenter Servers configured with Linked-Mode are sharing one Identify store, re-registering them assigns them the same service account ID. This results in the credentials (password/secret) being continuously overwritten, causing login failures and an eventual lockout.

Resolution

This will be fixed in the future release. 

There are 2 possible workarounds 

1) Ensure that each linked vc is registered in a different VLCR protected site. Note: This requires re-architecting the configuration.

2) If the above is not feasible, engage VMware by Broadcom Support . Engineering will use a customer script to create new VLCR service account and will need the users to connect over a screen share for input the desired password. The entered password will be in encoded form.