Quick post here. I recently updated my environment to vCenter 6.0 Update 1 and VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 and after my first attempted test failover (and subsequent ones) the test would always fail when it tried to power on the virtual machines. Some powered-on and some didn’t. The following errors appeared for about half of my VMs:
It says,
“Error – A general system error occurred: PBM error occurred during PreMigrateCheckCallback: Invalid response code: 503 Service Unavailable”
Alrighty. That means what? At first I thought maybe it was a VMware tools issue, so I made sure I had the latest and greatest installed on all of my VMs.
Re-attempted the test recovery and it failed again. No rhyme or reason to it, different VMs, no relationship to hosts or datastores or anything that I could tell. The datastores were recovered and the proper VMs registered but failed to power on.
If I tried to manually power them on in the Web Client, all of the power-on options were gone (well grayed-out). Looking in the logs there was not much more interesting,
2015-09-14T15:23:40.487-07:00 [02176 error ‘LocalPbmServer’] Exception caught while performing GetContent
–> std::exception ‘class Vmacore::Soap::InvalidResponseException’ “Invalid response code: 503 Service Unavailable”
2015-09-14T15:23:40.487-07:00 [02176 warning ‘LocalPbmServer’] Failed to connect: std::exception ‘class Vmacore::Soap::InvalidResponseException’ “Invalid response code: 503 Service Unavailable”
But I then realized that PBM probably means Policy Based Management or something close which probably means the Profile Driven Storage service. I clicked on the vCenter Storage Provider screen and sure enough the following error popped up:
Popped over to the service management page and gave it a start:
You can always just run the following too:
service vmware-sps start
And voila! My next test recovery worked like a charm. So I am not sure if this was a freak thing, a version thing or just the upgrade and the service wasn’t started (most likely). But there you go, pretty simple fix. Wish the error was a bit more clear though.
So I hit up google and found a KB article and a community post:
https://communities.vmware.com/message/2484314#2484314
Neither is related to SRM so I thought it was worth putting a post together.
You just, just saved my live. Thank you
Awesome! You’re very welcome
One thing i experienced during a recovery scenario is that we needed to migrate a SBS 2011 server that was virtualized from a recovery ESX to the original ESX, Prior to the migration to Azure for performance issues. This server was acting as the DNS Server and therefore it could not resolve. When adding the temporary VCenter and both ESX Servers to the Hosts file, it went smoothly.
On a vCenter Server running on Windows this same fix works when you start vSphere Profile Driven Storage Service
Nice helpful post Cody! We have a vRA implementation (no SRM in the mix) and this cropped up on a Friday night during our attempt to clone out a bunch of VMs in support of COVID-19 work from home efforts for my company. A quick restart of the vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service and we were back in business.
Glad to hear!! Really appreciate the message, really humbling to hear I could help