srm

Site Recovery Manager Error: Placeholder VM creation error: No hosts with hardware version 10

If you attended my SRM session at VMworld 2014, or one of the VMUG User Conference sessions I’ve presented at, you’ve heard me talk about upgrading SRM and the entire infrastructure.

I stressed the importance of upgrading the Recovery/Target Site’s hosts before upgrading the Protected/Source Site’s hosts.

As you can imagine, upgrading out of order does happen, and I got to see exactly what happens when you’re in that situation. Well, not in a disaster, but in regular day-to-day tasks.

Have you seen this error when trying to protect a VM in SRM, specifically trying to create the placeholder?

Placeholder VM creation error: No hosts with hardware version ’10’ and datastore(s) [datastore01] which are powered on and not in maintenance mode are available

Setting EMC’s RecoverPoint SRM SRA to Authenticate over SSL for 4.0 and 4.1

You may or may not know that EMC’s SRA defaults to authenticating over non-SSL communication. It basically hits the RecoverPoint Appliance (RPA) on port 80 when doing anything. RPAs don’t handle a NAT, so chances are your devices are not publicly facing, at least I hope not!

It’s always a better idea to encrypt any traffic containing usernames and passwords, so why wouldn’t you do this? In RPA versions up to 4.0, they defaulted to non SSL, although they refer to it as non-https. RPA 4.1 no longer accepts port 80 and requires you to use 443, or https, or SSL encrypted, whatever you want to say.

This is great, until you try to add RPA 4.1 to a standard install of RecoverPoint’s 2.2 SRA. Why? Well, because it defaults to non-https and doesn’t give you an intuitive way to change it.

Adding RPA 4.1 to SRA 2.2 will give you this error:

“SRA command ‘discoverArrays’ failed. Failed opening session for user to site mgmt IP.
Please see server logs for further details.”

Check the vmware-dr.log and you’ll likely see something like

Error code=”1049″

and what’s funny is I even found “Ouch!” in the log, lol! I love when devs throw things like that out there.

Keep reading for the fix!

Building a Disaster Recovery Solution using Site Recovery Manager – Part 1: Planning

I wrote this blog article for Rackspace to go on their Blog. Original can be found HERE on the Rackspace Blog site.

VMware® vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager™ is used to orchestrate the failover of a group of virtual machines (VMs) from one location to another. It’s a really useful tool to have in your arsenal to tackle the daunting task of disaster recovery (DR), especially if you take a little time to plan for how and when it will be used.

SRM Connection or Session Limit Reached
Scroll down for the Update

Have you ran into one of these errors before:

     [exec] AxisFault
     [exec]  faultCode: ServerFaultCode
     [exec]  faultSubcode: 
     [exec]  faultString: fault.drextapi.fault.ConnectionLimitReached.summary
     [exec]  faultActor: 
     [exec]  faultNode: 
     [exec]  faultDetail: 
     [exec]     {urn:srm0}SrmFaultConnectionLimitReachedFault:<connectionLimit>10</connectionLimit>
     [exec] fault.drextapi.fault.ConnectionLimitReached.summary

[exec] AxisFault

[exec] faultCode: ServerFaultCode

[exec] faultSubcode:

[exec] faultString: fault.drextapi.fault.ConnectionLimitReached.summary

[exec] faultActor:

[exec] faultNode:

[exec] faultDetail:

[exec] {urn:srm0}SrmFaultConnectionLimitReachedFault:<connectionLimit>10</connectionLimit>

[exec] fault.drextapi.fault.ConnectionLimitReached.summary

     [exec] AxisFault
     [exec]  faultCode: ServerFaultCode
     [exec]  faultSubcode: 
     [exec]  faultString: dr.fault.SessionLimitExceeded
     [exec]  faultActor: 
     [exec]  faultNode: 
     [exec]  faultDetail: 
     [exec] 	{urn:srm0}MethodFaultFault:<vim25:reason>Invalid fault</vim25:reason>
     [exec] dr.fault.SessionLimitExceeded
     [exec] 	at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
     [exec] 	at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
     [exec] 	at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)

[exec] AxisFault

[exec] faultCode: ServerFaultCode

[exec] faultSubcode:

[exec] faultString: dr.fault.SessionLimitExceeded

[exec] faultActor:

[exec] faultNode:

[exec] faultDetail:

[exec] {urn:srm0}MethodFaultFault:<vim25:reason>Invalid fault</vim25:reason>

[exec] dr.fault.SessionLimitExceeded

[exec] at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)

[exec] at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)

[exec] at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)

Or in the GUI:Lost connection to remote SRM server. Unable to login. The maximum number of SRM users has been reached.RJ, from RJApproves.com, & I had been plagued by these messages for weeks, maybe even months. Well, we finally got it all figured out!

Keep reading for the fix!

VMware Site Recovery Manager & Active Directory – Part 2 – Domain Controllers in test environment

On May 25th, I published this post covering some scenarios on how to use Site Recovery Manager & Active Directory. Michael White from VMware responded with some good info. He had an awesome suggestion of using a script to cold clone a DC daily to use for testing.

Let’s take a look at some ways we can get this done:

To include Active Directory or not to include Active Directory, that is the question.

I’ve been reading a lot around VMware’s Site Recovery Manager and considerations surrounding Active Directory. Most of what you will read says ‘NEVER’ protect AD with SRM, only use native AD replication, especially since SRM & vCenter at your Recovery Site require AD to be running anyway.

But what if you have multiple domains for different uses? This is where the lines become blurred. Think about this for a second:

One AD environment (single forest/domain, no trusts) where vCenter & SRM live, call it infrastructure AD
A second AD environment (also single forest/domain, no trusts) for your application servers, call it application AD
You have infrastructure AD at both sites, SRM & vCenter authenticate accordingly
Protected site has application AD
Recovery site has nothing

Now here is where I say ‘why wouldn’t you protect AD with SRM?’ In a true disaster, the protected site is gone, no AD exists anywhere, so using SRM to bring them up on the recovery site makes sense. Is my logic flawed?

However, if I had my application AD living at both sites, using native replication, I agree 100% in not including your Domain Controllers in your SRM Recovery Plan. This leads to my concern…

Testing vs Planned vs Unplanned

This post will cover testing only. I’ll write a follow-up covering planned & unplanned failovers later.

To me, the only way to really test your DR plan (in this instance, your SRM Recovery Plan) is to not have anything different between them.

How often should I conduct a disaster recovery test? – TechTarget.com contribution

I recently became a contributor on TechTarget.com by answering the common question: How often should I conduct a disaster recovery test?

Feel free to swing on over to TechTarget.com and read what I have to say, here’s a link: http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/answer/How-often-should-I-conduct-a-disaster-recovery-test

Thanks, and happy scripting!

Site Recovery Manager 5.1 installation fails connecting to database – dbmanager could not initialize vdb connection

I recently ran into an issue when installing SRM and thought I’d share. I didn’t get a screenshot, but the error was something like this:

Failed to Initialize – dbmanager could not initialize vdb connection – odbc error

If you click skip from there, it’ll fail to create the tables, and eventually get to the point where you’ll have to roll back.

As it turns out, it was due to a c0mp73x”P@s$w0rd! that caused the problem. I’m not sure what characters killed it, but going to a less complex pAs5w0rd worked fine. ODBC worked fine, user & permissions were set up properly, it just came down to SRM not being able to handle the special characters. What’s strange is a similarly complex password works for vCenter.

Hope this helps, have fun out there!

Site Recovery Manager failed to start – service did not respond to start in timely fashion

I noticed today that one of my two SRM servers wasn’t online in vCenter. I did some quick checking and found the service itself wasn’t running, and the last log entry was from seven days ago (the SRM log is located here “C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager\Logs”).

It has some info about it being shutdown, and it turns out that was our production patch cycle that rebooted the server. I checked ODBC, all was well, could manually connect to the database just fine. I also checked on the other SRM server, but it was 100%. I restarted both servers and nothing changed: one worked, the other didn’t.

I’m guessing since the service wouldn’t start, it wouldn’t update the log (which is why last write time was June 7th). The windows application log was unhelpful, and the system log only had the typical message

The VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Server service failed to start due to the following error: 
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

1 2	The VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Server service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

On a whim, I decided to delete the System ODBC connection and recreate it. After that, SRM started fine.

I’m still on version 5.0, no Update 1 yet. If I encounter this problem again, I’ll upgrade to Update 1 and see if it comes back.

Just thought I’d share.

Creating your own Root CA with OpenSSL on Windows, and signing vCenter or SRM certs

In This Post, I created certificates for my SRM & vCenter servers where I used a separate signing authority. What if you don’t have one, but still want to use your own certs? You create your own Root Certificate Authority (root CA) via OpenSSL. Here’s how…

ThepHuck

srm

Site Recovery Manager Error: Placeholder VM creation error: No hosts with hardware version 10

Setting EMC’s RecoverPoint SRM SRA to Authenticate over SSL for 4.0 and 4.1

Building a Disaster Recovery Solution using Site Recovery Manager – Part 1: Planning

VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1 Connection & Session Limits – Updated

SRM Connection or Session Limit Reached
Scroll down for the Update

Keep reading for the fix!

VMware Site Recovery Manager & Active Directory – Part 2 – Domain Controllers in test environment

VMware Site Recovery Manager & Active Directory – Part 1 – Testing Recovery Plans with Active Directory

To include Active Directory or not to include Active Directory, that is the question.

Testing vs Planned vs Unplanned

This post will cover testing only. I’ll write a follow-up covering planned & unplanned failovers later.

How often should I conduct a disaster recovery test? – TechTarget.com contribution

Site Recovery Manager 5.1 installation fails connecting to database – dbmanager could not initialize vdb connection

Site Recovery Manager failed to start – service did not respond to start in timely fashion

Creating your own Root CA with OpenSSL on Windows, and signing vCenter or SRM certs

srm

SRM Connection or Session Limit Reached ***Scroll down for the Update***

Keep reading for the fix!

To include Active Directory or not to include Active Directory, that is the question.

Testing vs Planned vs Unplanned

This post will cover testing only. I’ll write a follow-up covering planned & unplanned failovers later.

SRM Connection or Session Limit Reached
Scroll down for the Update