Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

Quick post to cover a fix for installing the VNXe SRA when you encounter the below error:

Failed to load SRA from ‘C:/Program Files/VMware/VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager/storage/sra/EMC VNXe SRA’. SRA command ‘queryInfo’ didn’t return a response.

The components installed (in this order) are:

1. vSphere 5.5
2. SRM 5.5
3. UNISphere CLI 1.5.4.1.0027-1
4. VNXe SRA 5.0.0

The root cause is that the system locale is EN-GB rather than EN-US, however even changing the locale does not resolve the issue. The Java installation will still try and load an en_GB module and fail. The solution is as follows:

Yesterday saw another fantastic London VMUG with lots of quality sessions and opportunities to network with peers and friends. The committee seem to do a fantastic job every time and this one was no exception, so thanks to Alaric Davies, Jane Rimmer, Stuart Thompson and Simon Gallagher!

I’ve been playing about with a compact SRM install in my lab - since I have limited resources and only one site I wanted to create a run-through for anyone learning SRM to be able to do it in their own lab too. I am creating two sites on the same IP subnet (pretend it’s a stretched LAN across two sites) and will be protecting a single, tiny Linux web server using vSphere Replication. I’m aiming to cover SAN based replication in a later post.

I’m fairly new to SRM, but even so this one seemed like a real head-scratcher! If you happen to be using CA signed certificates on your “protected site” vCenter and “recovery site” vCenter servers, when you come to linking the two SRM sites you encounter SSLHandShake errors – basically SRM assumes you want to use certificates for authentication because you’re using signed certificates. If you use the default self-signed certificates, SRM will default to using password authentication (see SRM Authentication). Where the process fails is during the “configure connection” stage, if either one of your vCenter servers does not have CA signed and the other does (throws an error that they are using different authentication methods) or that you are using self-signed certificates for either SRM installation (throws an error that the certificate or CA could not be trusted).