Veeam mistaking Cloned VM's for Replica VM's

[sixpack]

We are using Veeam Backup and Replication 7.0 Version 7.0.0.690 on vSphere 4.1

We have a Veeam replication job running to a destination vSphere server.

On the destination server we have cloned the Veeam replica VM to a new server and started it up to do testing on it.

The Veeam replication job is now failing with an error saying that the destination replica is running, although it isn't, only the cloned VM we made from the replica is running.

[Gostev]

Please double check if you have powered on correct VM, and if yes - open a support case. I would expect the cloned VM to have different moRef ID, and thus not cause any issues to replication jobs. However, may be there is something about cloning we don't know.

[tsightler]

I believe this is a known issues that has affected Veeam since 6.0. When Veeam creates a replica it adds a custom attribute to the replica called VeeamReplicaSummary that includes a lot of metadata about the replica and it's source in an XML formatted attribute. Once this attribute is created Veeam appears to use this metadata as a method to uniquely identify the target replica as well. If you create a clone of this replica, this custom attribute is also cloned and Veeam will then potentially identify the wrong replica as the target VM for replication, since there are now more than one system with the same attributes. The easiest solution is, if you clone a Veeam replica, be sure to set the value of the VeeamReplicaSummary attribute on the clone to null or optionally manually delete the entire attribute from the VMX.

[Gostev]

Ah, thanks Tom.

[sixpack]

Many thanks for that Tom, thought it might be something like that.