Replicas getting changed to different VMs??

[tholyoak]

We have VMware 7 Essentials on 2 hosts running at our primary location and a backup location. I use Veeam to do replication and backups between them. I recently upgrade vCenter to version 8 on both sides to start preparing for the ESXi host upgrades.

The vCenter at our primary location started having some weird issues, and after looking up possible ways to fix it, I decided it would be easier to just delete it and create a new one. Then my replication jobs started failing. That's when I realized Veeam didn't like have a brand new vCenter thrown at it. For the VMs that failed, I removed them from the job and readded them, pointing them at the seed replica at the backup site. That worked for some of them. But others kept failing with "Cannot replicate disk because its capacity was reduced." After removing and readding one of them multiple times and still getting that error, I decided to power on the replica (making sure it wasn't connected to the network). It turned out to be a copy of a completely different VM! At that point, I decided the easiest thing to do would be to just delete the replica. That fixed it for that VM.

However, I have now found another VM where that is also the case. I'm starting to wonder if I need to power on all the replicas and make sure they're the correct VMs? Or am I OK just fixing the ones that give the error about the mismatched drive sizes? How did this even happen?

[veremin]

It’s difficult to identify the root cause based on a brief description and without debug logs. Please open a case with our support team for further investigation.

It’s possible that the machine identifier changed during the upgrade or migration, which could have affected the seeding and replication process, but a technical support engineer will be able to confirm it.

Thanks!