Articles by Bilal Ahmed

When you use SRM (in my case SRM version 5.8.1) in combination with VR to protect your VMs, SRM will own these VMs. You will not be able to recover these protected VMs using vSphere Replication on its own, as long as they are SRM protected.  This became an issue for us, simply because we had an issue where the SRM service would fail to start at the DR site. Working with VMware support we got it working again but neither VMware Support or myself really knew what the root cause was. A little SRA and SRM history We are using SRM in combination with SRA’s and had a Recovery Plan that was stuck in partial re-protect mode and no amount […]

So you can use vRDMs with vSphere Replication: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/07/vsphere-replication-virtual-rdm.html There aren’t many use cases for it and it isn’t documented very well. So I have just been pondering over something: vSphere replication supports VMs that have vRDMs but not pRDMs. ESXi5.5 now supports vRDMs up to 62TB. What it does, is it will bring the vRDM up as a VMDK file at the DR site. I am throwing this out there as a possible option for replication of our VMs that have RDMs attached, since we have a few VMs that have RDMs attached to them and which need to be replicated too. “If you wish to maintain the use of a virtual RDM at the target location, it is possible to […]

Basically, I had a recovery plan and I had done tests/cleanups/migrations/re-protects and it all worked exactly as expected,. But each time when I wanted to export the history reports it wouldn’t do anything! I would pick the type of report I wanted (html/doc etc), I would click generate report. It would generate it fine. But when I clicked download…I would get nothing. I click it and click it and nothing would happen?! I tried Chrome and Firefox, I had rebooted the SRM  service at both sites, the Web Client service at both sites. I had tried a different user account, I simply could not get the report to export. But every other plan exported fine. Then I was asking in the […]

These are the steps I took to apply this fix: First thing I did is I took a Veeam backup of the VM, then I copied over the files as downloaded from: Additional patch for security issue CVE-2015-2342 for vCenter Server 5.x on Windows (2144428) I did a md5 check Opened Command Prompt as administrator, and navigated to the folder where I had extracted the script and ran: cscript JMXScript5.<x>.vbs “<location_of_wrapper.conf_file>” cscript JMXScript5.5.vbs “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\vShereWebClient\server\bin\service\conf\wrapper.conf” Since I was running 5.5u3b, I already had a partial fix so it was just a matter of running the script to fully patch it. The script stops the web service, does it business and restarts the web service again. This takes about a minute or so. The […]