Replication causing DR vSphere to disconnect

[nwander05]

Support ticket 00808353.

We are currently replicating all of our VMs to our new SAN as it is in our production data center currently before we move it to our DR site. We are noticing as soon as we run a replication job the whole DR vCenter server crashes, which then causes the replication job to stop because it loses connection to the hosts. Has anyone had this problem before? We are currently running ESXi 5.5 and Veeam 8.0. I have two proxies on my source side and two proxies on my DR side that I use to move the VMs with.

Our backup jobs work flawlessly with no problems, but we are running into significant issues with replication and cannot move our SAN to the DR site until this is fixed.

Any ideas would be great!

Thanks

[foggy]

Hard to guess not knowing how your jobs are organized, but sounds really strange. Debug logs analysis should help here.

[nwander05]

Hello Foggy,

Our backup jobs run at 10pm tonight and I am testing with our AD VMs for replication right now during the day. When I choose my target in replication I am choosing the cluster and not a specific ESXi host. I will be testing sending to a host today instead of a cluster to see if that helps. We currently only have 1 NIC assigned for VM traffic, VMotion and management traffic in VMware networking and our other network uplink is assigned for iSCSI traffic. Do you think only having 1 up-link for the management, vmotion and vm traffic is not able to keep up? All of the connections at 10GB links into a Nexus 5k. We will be adding an additional NIC in the near future to team the up-link connections.

Does that help answer your question?

[nwander05]

I wanted to let anyone know if they experience this problem what I did to resolve it. We are plugging in Emulex NIC cards into our physical ESXi 5.5 hosts and Emulex cards into our vCenter server, which is physical. The cables we are using are SFP+ Copper Twinax Cables that plug into the HP DL380s and the Nexus. Apparently, the issue is the Emulex cards and we have since then plugged in with Ethernet cables and have not had any crashes or problems since then.

I will work with the company that manufactures the Emulex cards and HP to figure out if it is a driver issue or something more complex. I will report back what I find from the manufactures in case anyone else runs into this issue.