Replicated Virtual machine does not boot (4033970)

Replicated Virtual machine does not boot

After replication, the replica machine powers on properly but does not boot to the operating system.

One possible cause is that the disk geometry is different between the source and the destination VM. You can check this by comparing the disk configuration files on the datastores.

1. Connect to the source and destination hosts with your prefered terminal emulation software.
2. cd to the location of the source and destination VMs (cd /vmfs/volumes/<datastore-name>/<vm-name>
3. Type more <vm-name>.vmdk
4. Look for the lines describing the disk geometry in the output. They will appear similar to below, although the order of the lines could be different:
 ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
 ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
 ddb.geometry.cylinders = "4177"
5. Compare the values between the source and destination geometries. Here are some actual values from a replication that had this issue: 6. Observe that the souce and destination VMs have different disk geometries. The source VM has a non-standard geometry while the destination VM has the standard VMware disk geometry. There are several causes for this, but the most likely one is that the source VM was initially a physical machine that was migrated to a VM and the disk geometry matches that of the original physical disk.
7. Remove the disk from the destination VM.
8. Edit the destination vmdk file to match the geometry in the source vmdk file.
9. Reattach the disk to the destination VM. The VM should now boot.

vRanger is unable to use the original disk geometry to when it creates the replica virtual disk because this is not supported by the VMware API.