When I was working with a customer on their planned Disaster Recovery activity, I noticed a strange behavior in Site Recovery Manager.
Below are the version details that are deployed in customer environment. vCenter Server: 6.7U3 ESXi : 6.7U3f Site Recovery Manager: 8.2.1 vSphere Replication: 8.2.1
Issue: When I log on to the Protected Site SRM-> Recovery Plans, I get “Error: null” error and no recovery plans are listed. However, if I log on to the recovery site SRM -> Recovery Plans, all recovery plans are listed and working as expected.
It took a while to go through the logs and find out the exact issue.
At the end I found that there was a recovery plan created from Recovery Site and there was connection issue between Protected site and Recovery Site during the recovery plan creation. Because of connectivity issue, the recovery plan data was not properly replicated to Protected site SRM hence it was not able to populate the latest Recovery Plans.
After removing the recovery plan by logging on to Recovery site SRM, both sites Recovery plans are listing without any issues.
Below is a sample log that can be referred (/var/log/vmware/srm/vmware-dr.log) for key word “Failed to add child” to find out if any such plans are created in case of similar issues are noticed. In this case, recovery plan name is “VirtualMI-Application01-RecoveryPlan” ()
2020-06-10T23:18:06.390Z warning vmware-dr[30174] [SRM@6876 sub=Default opID=28d4ae43:b509:5137:01ba] Failed to add child. Key is already being used: VirtualMI-Application01-RecoveryPlan 2020-06-10T23:18:06.390Z warning vmware-dr[30174] [SRM@6876 sub=Folders opID=28d4ae43:b509:5137:01ba] CreatePlan[‘VirtualMI-Application01-RecoveryPlan’] failed. Another folder with same name already exists. 2020-06-10T23:18:06.395Z verbose vmware-dr[30174] [SRM@6876 sub=Folders opID=28d4ae43:b509:5137:01ba] CreatePlan[‘VirtualMI-Application01-RecoveryPlan’] Failed: (dr.fault.DuplicateName) { –> faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null, –> faultMessage = , –> name = “VirtualMI-Application01-RecoveryPlan”, –> object = ‘dr.recovery.RecoveryPlan:a8a734c4-9028-4155-b6c9-5b84407e28d9:b81d5f75-486c-447c-935b-a883c484d93a’ –> msg = “” –> }