It’s been long time since I have got some time to write blogs however I decided I will spare couple of hours today. Here we go
We came across issue with SRM Test Failover with EMC Recover Point. Following are the details for the same
Setup
VMware SRM 5.1
EMC Recover Pont Appliance (RPA) version 3.5.SP1.P2 (o.175)
EMC Recover Point SRA 2.1
Discoveries
- When there is no communication between Production and Recovery site the SRM recovery plan breaks at storage Snapshot layer and throws following error :
- “Error - Failed to create snapshots of replica devices. Failed to create snapshot of replica consistency group 16531CP. SRA command 'testFailoverStart' failed for consistency group '16531CP'. Replication is not active for some reason in group copy. Please see server logs for further details.”
- We have verified the same with EMC and they have confirmed this is a normal behavior in EMC RPA 3.5 however it has been fixed 4.0 SP1
Resolution/WorkAround
There are 2 options as a work around
- Perform SRM Recovery failover because of the failure to execute the test failover with network links down. Post completion discard the data and resync again to get back to normal state
- Introduce a Pause in Recovery Plan post Mounting of Storage so that it mounts the storage and pauses the recovery plan which will allow us to break the network connection
- In our case this was the requirement from the Customer so we had to follow this work around