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Planned Failover fails with error "The Virtual machine is not prepared for planned failover" in "Check Replica Virtual Machine state" step

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Scenario/Symptoms

  • You configure replication between 2 Hyper-V Servers, SERVER1.contoso.com and SERVER2.contoso.com. The primary virtual machine is hosted in SERVER1.contoso.com

  • You successfully do a planned failover for replicated virtual machine from a SERVER1.contoso.com to SERVER2.contoso.com (in the process making the VM in SERVER2.contoso.com the PRIMARY virtual machine)

  • You do a Planned failover of the same virtual machine from SERVER2.contoso.com to SERVER2.contoso.com in a short period of time after doing the first failover.

  • Hyper-V Planned Failover fails with "The Virtual machine is not prepared for planned failover" in step "Check Replica virtual machine state" as shown in screenshot below. Error Text reads as "Unable to validate if the Replica Virtual machine is ready for reverse replication. Clear the reverse replication check box then start reverse replication from the Replica Server"
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    http://i57.tinypic.com/10hosp1.png

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  • In this case, there are no Event logs generated in pertinent to the error in  Hyper-V VMMS Event Logs

Resolution

The issue occurs because the virtual machine has not completed at least 1 cycle of replication after the 1st Planned failover with Reverse Replication occurred. Before the second Planned Failover with Reverse Replication is performed, at least 1 cycle of replication should occur coming for the new Primary virtual machine.

Wait for the configured Replication interval to occur (e.g. 30 seconds, 5 minutes or 15 minutes) before performing another Planned failover with Planned Failover operation.

If you are doing a demo, my suggestion is to configure a 30-second interval so that a replication cycle is completed in time before you perform another Planned Failover with Reverse Replication

Hope this helps!