We use Platespin to do scheduled P2V migrations to provide DR for some of the physical servers at a customer site. I have been troubleshooting some issues with the scheduled protection jobs over the last week or so. The jobs had been running fine for the last couple of months. I have the jobs scheduled to do full synchronizations once per month (first of the month) and all but 2 failed this month. The problem was really strange because I could kick off the full sync and it would run fine for a long time and then all the sudden it would just stall out with a “recoverable error”. I tried all my usual steps to recover from this error…nothing worked.  I used to see this all the time after the new Barracuda was installed. For that issue, I would just add a setting to the ofxcontroller.config file on the source side to bypass the proxy. So, I started searching for another config file that might need to be changed. After tracking the traffic with wireshark, I finally decided there was no interference by the proxy. I submitted a support ticket with Platespin and the tech that working my case asked me whether I was using the “WAN optimizations”. WAN optimizations? That must be a config setting I had never seen. He explained that the problem I was having was that I was running into the 24-hour job termination window. [more]

Any Platespin job MUST complete in 24-hours or it will fail with this “Recoverable Error” message. Actually, the error is not recoverable at all…you have to abort the job and start over. PlateSpin uses WinPE for the target side pre-execution environment when doing the migration/protection jobs. WinPE requires a license if launched for more than 24-hours…platespin doesn’t have the license so the target VM will REBOOT ITSELF after 24 hrs. Hence, the recoverable error that isn’t recoverable. So, back to the WAN optimizations. To help the job finish in time, there are config values you can change in the product’s productinternal.config (for v8.0 or powerconvert.config for PowerConvert Server 7.0) configuration file, located on your Portability Suite Server host, in the following directory:   \Program Files\PlateSpin Portability Suite Server\Web\

Setting Default For WANs
fileTransferThreadCount 2 4 to 6
fileTransferMinCompressionLimit 0 (disabled) 65536 (64KB which is the max)
fileTransferCompressionThreadsCount 2 n/a (the 2 is ignored if compression is disabled)
fileTransferSendReceiveBufferSize 0(8192 bytes) 5242880 (5 MB is max, use formula(LINK_SPEED(Mbps)/8)*DELAY(sec)) *1024*1024 to figure out what your setting should be)

After implementing these settings, full sync jobs were completing in 25% of the time they had been taking. It’s a huge improvement.

You might also want to check out a previous post on Moving a PlateSpin Image Between Image Servers to Setup a DR Sync that discusses using local image servers at both ends to seed a server image across a WAN.