SRM 6.1 POC Update & PSC Problems

I recently ran into some problems during my first attempt at pairing the two sites in my SRM POC, which resulted in a failure, and some misleading error messages.  Since help on this was pretty scarce on the ‘net, I opened a case with VMware Support.  After about a week’s worth of troubleshooting – repairing the installation, re-installing SRM with a fresh database, and certificate regeneration/registration provided no resolution.

As I was waiting for an escalation from VMware, we discovered that one of the PSCs in this environment stopped replicating changes to the other. Upon further analysis, I discovered that it had been about a month since that particular platform service controller had stopped replicating changes. What made it tough to find the problem here was that we were still able to get into vCenter and manage it just fine, but taking a peek under the covers proved there was definitely an issue.  It was by chance a license change to vCenter exposed this problem when we saw that the change didn’t make it from one vCenter to the other.

The following command will provide you with the results seen below, which indicate the synchronization problem:

On each PSC, run the following command from the vmdird directory: 

• .\vdcrepadmin.exe -f showpartnerstatus -h localhost -u administrator -w [password]

Partner: psc1.domain.local
Host available: Yes
Status available: Yes
My last change number: 872590
Partner has seen my change number: 10846
Partner is 861744 changes behind.

Partner: psc2.domain.local
Host available: Yes
Status available: Yes
My last change number: 2147483197
Partner has seen my change number: 2147483197
Partner is 0 changes behind.

 

Since this had been discovered, the support engineer and I agreed that we should put the site recovery pairing on hold until the PSC issue was resolved, just so we didn’t have too many variables involved in our troubleshooting. To make a long story short, the PSC synchronization was the root cause of SRM not being able to pair the sites, and I’ve also written up a series on re-creating the environment in isolation, and performing the PSC replacement to provide the ultimate solution.