Upgrading vCenter server to 5.5 update 3b and above loses accessibility to Site Recovery Manager
With the latest vulnerability in the market all the users are involved in getting their environment updated with the latest patches.
I was handling one such case for one of my customer where the environment was running with vCenter 5.5 update 1 and SRM was adjacently running on 5.5.1 which is certainly a compatible one.
Customer scheduled a upgrade of vCenter to 5.5 update 3g which is the latest build at this point of time and the moment upgrade was successful SRM failed to connect intermittently.
We verified the compatibility matrix and found 5.5 update 3 was compatible with SRM 5.5.1. Well that was not explaining the cause of the issue.
VMware-DR logs were flooded with “SSL routines:SSL routines:short read” error messages. So it was quite evident the issue is lying in context to SSL connections.
Investigating further we checked and found post vCenter update 3b sslV3 was disabled and TLS protocol was enabled. SRM 5.5.1 being a earlier version was communicating via sslV3 protocol and those communications were being rejected.
We managed to find latest release of SRM i.e 5.5.1.7 build 4265224 which was released post vCenter 5.5 update 3b was released. So it was expected to have the TLS protocol enabled under that patch.
Recommended the customer to upgrade the SRM build on both the sites to 5.5.1.7 . The moment upgrade was successful SRM worked like a charm.
I hope this article was helpful. Watch out for more.
