topic Re: Had to rebuild my VSRA/SRM appliances and can't break the site pair in Site Recovery Manager Discussions

Had to rebuild my VSRA/SRM appliances and can't break the site pair

merkjones — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 17:42:06 GMT

Hello everyone!

I am running on vCenter 6.7 due to budget reasons (as I'm sure we've all experienced a few times) and I had to update the SSL certs on my DR and PROD vCenters, which broke SRM/VSRA. I couldn't get help and the KBs were confusing, so I rebuilt my appliances. Of course, the replications are broken which is fine... I am trying to force delete / clean out all of the folder mappings, protection plans and groups, etc. I can't find much on the internet about this so I figured I'd ask the community. Is this doable?

Thanks!

Ward

Re: Had to rebuild my VSRA/SRM appliances and can't break the site pair

Gizzie — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 10:26:01 GMT

Log in to the vCenter Server that is hosting the SRM/VSRA -> Administration > System Configuration > vSphere Site Recovery Manager. > Protection tab > Select the protection plan that you want to delete > Click Delete > In confirmation box, select Force Delete checkbox > Click Delete

Keep a few things in mind that you cannot delete a protection plan that is currently in use, Also if you delete a protection plan, any virtual machines that are protected by the plan will be unprotected

Further after deleting the plan, you will need to recreate it if you want to restore the virtual machines that were protected by the plan.

Re: Had to rebuild my VSRA/SRM appliances and can't break the site pair

merkjones — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 16:44:19 GMT

Hmmm... I can't seem to find that under administration. I switched to the vsphere.local admin account and I only see my vCenter under that option.

Re: Had to rebuild my VSRA/SRM appliances and can't break the site pair

merkjones — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 18:31:48 GMT

I have a plan, but I wanted to run it by the community:

Unregister my new VSRA/SRM boxes gracefully
Go into /mob and remove the plugins for SRM and VSRA
Re-register

When I was connecting my new ones it mentioned it was going to remove my broken / old ones, which it did, but I assumed it would go through and unregister. It seems like it doesn't because the db is still holding on to old replications / and groups.

Re: Had to rebuild my VSRA/SRM appliances and can't break the site pair

BivasM — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 09:40:55 GMT

i think you should remove any plans you have first. then remove any protection group. and then break the site pair to do a clean removal.

Re: Had to rebuild my VSRA/SRM appliances and can't break the site pair

merkjones — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 13:39:14 GMT

I can't, they're all stuck. Delete is grayed out for VMs, protection groups and plans unfortunately. I'm thinking that since I installed 8.5.0 over top of 8.4 or whatever I had before it kept the database in vCenter.

Re: Had to rebuild my VSRA/SRM appliances and can't break the site pair

merkjones — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:52:57 GMT

OK I've made progress... I unregistered my new appliances while the old ones were on. Turned those off. Re-registered the appliances and it's connect. I have one last problem...

Operation Failed
vSphere Replication Management Server could not establish connection to remote vSphere Replication Management Server at 'remoteVSRA:8043'.

I'm reading KB about it saying I need to get into the DB and clean it, but it's referencing MSSQL so I think that's an older one. I've unregistered everything so the new IP shouldn't matter I wouldn't think. Going to keep chasing it, but I've gotten over the biggest hurdle.

Edit: I rebooted the VSRA and it's looking better. Doing a test replication now to see what happens. Fingers crossed!