Trying to replicate a bitlocker enbaled VM with ASR.

Question

We currently have a on-premises VM (VMWare) with 3 disk that have BitLocker enabled on them.

I have replicated the VM using ASR but are not able to failover the VM or do a a Test Failover. I get an error every time.
Error below:
Error Message
Failover for the virtual machine failed with error code 'HvrScriptUnexpectedVolumeFormat'.
Possible causes
This could be happen if the OS volume is encrypted. virtual machines with encrypted OS volumes are not supported by Server Failover.
Recommendation
If the OS volume is not encrypted, retry failover to a different recovery point in time. If the issue persists, please contact Microsoft support.

Our questions are as follows:

1. Are BitLocker disk supported in ASR replication?
2. If not, can we turn off BitLocker at the source VM, wait for ASR to replicate the un-encrypted disk(BitLocker off) and then do a failover? I'm assuming that the most recent RPO will catch up with the un-encrypted disk after a few hours...?

Answer 1

Hello @Anonymous - Thank you for posting in Microsoft Q&A community forum!

From the details provided in the original post, I see that you have enabled replication for your VMware VMs enabled with bitlocker and are getting failure messages. Because we do not support bitlocker enabled VMs for replication. BitLocker must be disabled before you enable replication for a machine and should stay disabled while the machine is replicating via Site Recovery. See the support matrix link - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/vmware-physical-azure-support-matrix

I've responded to a similar question here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/576537/asr-replication-for-a-vm-with-a-bitlocker-disks.html

Hope this answers your question!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If the response helped, do "Accept Answer" and up-vote it