Has anyone used vSphere Replication (or Site Recovery Manager) to replicate Windows VMs? Over the summer we started to use this as a DR solution. There were seven VMs replicated over fast links (1 GB, I believe) to a location less than a mile away. The replication for the most part was working. We were even able to bring down 4 source servers, bring up the targets and test the services provided by those servers successfully.
The problem is that the SQL servers in particular had lots of different Event Log errors related to VSS, NTFS, SQL, as well as vCenter Log errors. It got to the point that the SQL servers were completely unresponsive on multiple occasions. Now that I’ve had time to look through more logs, every single one of the seven Windows servers that we replicated had these types of errors and had at least some network disruptions due to the resource exhaustion. Before and after replication, none of these problems existed. They are a mix of Windows 2003 and 2008 R2 VMs. They are even running on a couple of very disparate hosts (IBM Blade Centers and Cisco UCS), but have the same issues regardless of that. I have a case open with VMware, though so far I’m not having much luck. I’m not really asking for help with this, but because this is affecting 100% of the VMs we’ve tried, I wanted to find out if anyone else has used this solution without having these issues. Overall, our VMware environment is pretty healthy and we run several hundred VMs with little downtime.
