Process Replica VM steps fail when no vmware tools

[andre.simard]

Hi,

Is there a way to avoid getting a fail in the Process Replica VM steps when a vm doesn't have vmware tools installed?

We have virtual appliances that are OVA provide by manufacturers and they do not support the installation of vmtools.

Those vm are always reported as failed when we run the Orchestrator plan.

I understand that the Process Replica VM step is looking for stable IP to report the task as successfully, but it could be nice if we can have a choice of another way of verifying the vm state and avoid having a fail task on a vm that is successfully started.

Thank you,

[Alec King]

Hello Andre,
You are correct, we have a 'stabilization' algorithm that watches various factors during replica failover, one of them being VM network initialization. This requires VMware Tools in the guestOS.
Some such checks are mandatory as they actually run in the VBR server, they are not implemented in VAO. VAO simply reports the result.
In general this works OK as almost all VMs have VMware Tools installed. However there are exceptions as you have found.

We are always looking to improve our checks and processes, and we are researching this. Perhaps the first change we could implement would be a method to simply turn off the initialization checks within Process Replica step. If the VM has no VMTools by design, it makes sense to skip those checks.
We could implement this in a future version, however I can't say now when the feature would ship.

A workaround for the moment is to change the parameter 'Critical Step' of the Process Replica step to 'No' for the problem VMs. This would still log an error, but as a non-critical step it would not halt the plan.

Hope that helps!

[andre.simard]

Hi Alec,

Thank you for your reply. For the moment I have changed the critical step like you recommanded.