SRM 6 Upgrade: Not Connected to SRM Server

By | February 12, 2016

I upgraded my vCenter to 6.0u1b so I needed to upgrade my SRM 5.8 servers to 6.1. My first attempt to upgrade the 6.1 installer lambasted me for trying to go from 5.8 to 6.1, I needed to upgrade to 6.0 first.

After upgrading to 6.0, I did not see the Site Recovery Manager icon in the Web Client. This was a fairly common issue, simply restart the Web Client on both vCenters got things going.

The next issue was that I would open the plugin but BOTH sites would state:

“Client Connection: Not Connected to <SRM server> at :9086”

I did not have an option to re-pair or login to site.

Support had me un-install SRM (but KEEP the database), remove the com.vcDR extension in vCenter using this KB, and then re-install SRM. Note that I did not have to re-install the SRAs.

At first login, things looked the same but I WAS able to re-pair the sites. On one site it said it was connected to both sites, but I still had some issues browsing through the SRM tabs. It also would show an error popup in the lower right window that there was an invalid username/password trying to login to the remote site and that it could retrieve the site pairs. Using the second site, it would show not connected to both sites.

A second TSE actually had me try to login as administrator@vsphere.local instead of my AD credentials. Surprisingly that worked fine from both sites. After talking to some vCenter TSEs he had me try moving the SSO identify source from integrated AD to LDAP (using this KB but in reverse). Logging in with my AD credentials worked fine. I did have to re-enter my SRA credentials but I’m not sure if this was due to the upgrade. Next week I’ll do the last part of the upgrade to 6.1.

I’m not sure what the drawbacks of using LDAP vs AD integrated (I thought there were some issues with kerberos login), but for now I’ll have to deal with it. I did submit a feature request, so hopefully they’ll address the issue at some point.

13 thoughts on “SRM 6 Upgrade: Not Connected to SRM Server

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  3. Kevin Garnes

    SRM 6 Upgrade: Not Connected to SRM Server
    Hello Chris
    Did VMware ever get back to you with a fix using AD authentication?
    Thanks

    Reply
    1. Chris Post author

      Hi Kevin,

      Unfortunately they basically told me that I would have to submit a feature request (which I did). I heard that it’s gotten some traction but I haven’t gotten an update

      Reply
  4. Simon

    Just wanted to say a massive thanks for posting this. We had to rebuild our vCentre instances (thus going with the default integrated domain login with sso 6) and also our SRM set up. Ended up wrestling with this issue for a while and this is the single web page I came across with the solution.

    VMware don’t seem to have this massive oversight documented anywhere! Changed it to LDAP in SSO and it kicked straight in and allowed me to continue configuring it.

    Thanks again, saved me a bunch of time, and sanity!

    Reply
  5. Kyle

    We just encountered this same bug after moving our SSO identity source from LDAP to AD integrated.
    I’ve reached out to VMware for an update on the “feature request” (aka bug fix) that they asked you to submit.

    Reply
  6. BlueArcher

    Hi, thanks for the post. We seem to be having this problem too, except our env is > 10 vCenters and SRM 6.1 so it is annoying because we can’t seem to view SRM data for linked mode vCenters without being logged in to the web client on the vCenter we want to access.

    Have you received any further news from VMware on your feature request?

    Reply
    1. Michael O'Toole

      We have been getting the same issue with SRM and update to update 3. unfortunately it did not fix the issues. we have a dev environment with the same issue so i will try the LDAP solution and see if that works.

      Reply
      1. TomB

        We, also, applied 6.0 U3 and found that it did not fix the issue. VMware support was looking in to it, but hasn’t been able to resolve the issue yet. I’ve just been using vsphere.local accounts for now, as I have a deadline for SRM testing.

        Reply
  7. MattK

    FYI: We had this issue as well and updated to latest 6.5 as of 11/7/17 and still not fixed. Changing to LDAP also fixed the issue for us. Thanks,

    Reply

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