vSphere Replication Appliance installation or desinstallation fail

[Ludovicmag]

Hi,

I installed vSphere Replication Appliance on my brand new cluster. I was able to access to the vSphere Replication interface correctly. Unfortunately, I needed to power off all my VMs for maintenance directly by clicking on "power off" button, not via a clean shutdown. Since then I cannot access to the vSphere Replication interface anymore.

I tried to register the appliance once again by connecting to the VAMI of the vSphere Replication Appliance, thinking that it will solve the issue but when I try to "save and restart", I end up with the error: Bad exit code: 1.

I also tried to click on "Unregister VRMS" but no success (I don't remember the exact error in that case).

So I deleted the vSphere Replication Appliance VM and followed the procedure "Unregister vSphere Replication from vCenter Server If the Appliance Was Deleted" from the official vSphere Replication documentation. Unfortunately even after this procedure, vSphere Replication extension still shows up on my vSphere Client interface (both HTML5 and FLEX interfaces) I tried to logoff and logon back again, restart VCSA VM but the vSphere Replication extension stays there.

Despite this error, I tried to deploy a new vSphere Replication Appliance instance, but again when I try to "save and restart" the same Bad exit code: 1 appears.

Do you have any idea what could be wrong on my cluster that prevent me to set up vSphere Replication? Or is there any other method to definitely remove the vSphere Replication extension to ensure that everything is "clean" for a new deployment?

Thank you for you help.

My environment:

vSphere Client: 6.7.0

vSphere Replication Appliance: 8.1.0.5849 Build 8310693

[Ludovicmag]

Update:

Because I don't have important VMs currently running on my cluster, I reinstalled a brand new VCSA to start from scratch. I redeployed vSphere Replication Appliance and again I ended up with the Bad exit code: 1 error code.

My set up is relatively simple: 3 hosts and 2 SANs. I use EVC on my cluster but as far as I can see, there is no incompatibility issues with vSphere Replication Appliance.

Thanks!

[Ludovicmag]

Update:

Initially my vSphere Replication Appliance doesn't Internet access. I wanted to check if there was updates for this appliance directly via the VAMI, so I enabled Internet access on my firewall for my cluster.

Then I tried again to set up vSphere Replication and magically it worked! I have now my vSphere Replication connected to my vSphere Web with the plugin installed.

I have no idea if it's a normal behavior or just a lucky workaround.

I will try to set up a test environment to try again without and with Internet access to see if I have the same result.

[sjesse]

Did you ever fix this, I'm seeing this after changing SSL certificates on our external PSCs.

[arxix]

So I had the same "Bad exit code: 1" error message on a newly deployed lab (also not connected to the outside internet) as you seemed to have had. After a while of just trying stuff, and reboots, I clicked the "Generate and Install" button for SSL cert, logged back in and then magically the "Save and Restart Service" worked! I logged out and back in and the Site Recovery icon showed under my inventories so hopefully that's it.

Maybe a bug in the cert system or something? Who knows. It works now and hopefully it works for someone else. If this work for someone else, please reply back that it fixed it so I know what exactly worked.

vSphere 6.7 U1

Replication 8.1

[1KeWa]

I had same issue with newly deployed vSphere replication appliance (version 8.2). "Generate and install" new cert helped. Not sure why but that option was grayed out initially and was available after some time. Clicked the option and regenerated the cert. Then logged off and logged back in and I was able to configure the appliance without any issue.