During operation of vSphere Replication, you come across this message:

“The vSphere Replication configuration of the virtual machine has an issue: Replication is already enabled.”

What does this mean? How do I fix it? Why did this happen to me?????

Well, the answers are really simple, someone screwed up in one way or another, I have seen it happen when a VM configuration was changed incorrectly, to a botched SRM/VR upgrade.

In any case, the end result is that the VM is marked as being replicated inside ESX, and ESX is pointing to a VR instance that does not have the same information as ESX, we need to break this.

<note important> This process will have to be done on each ESX host, for each VM that is having that issue, this is because the settings we are changing are per VM/ESX, get ready for a lot of typing. </note>

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms 

This will get you a list of Virtual Machines registered on that host, note the first column “VMID” we will need that later, write down all the VMIDs of the VMs giving you that problem.

Next we will need to cancel the bad replication configuration for each VM, we use the VMID, remember I told you to save it? :)

vim-cmd hbrsvc/vmreplica.disable VMID

After this, you can go back to the VR GUI and re-create the replication, and all will be right with the world.

Good luck