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Thursday, September 15, 2011

Unable to authenticate with paired remote vCenter server when launching the VMware Site Recovery Manager plug-in

Problem

You have SRM 4.1.1 (Site Recovery Manager) fully deployed at your production and disaster recovery site but noticed that upon logging into either of the 2 SRM servers, you get prompted with:

Enter login credentials for the remote vCenter Server

image

If you try to use the format:

domainFQDN\username (contoso.local\someAdminAccount)

You receive the error:

Login failed due to a bad username or password 

image

You try restarting vCenter again to try the format:

username@domainFQDN (someAdminAccount@contoso.com)

… but it fails with:

Lost connection to remote vCenter Server due to invalid credentials.

Please reconfigure the site connection with valid credentials.

… and doesn’t let you try again: 

image

You restart vCenter again and try the format:

username (someAdminAccount)

… and it fails again with:

Lost connection to remote vCenter Server due to invalid credentials.

Please reconfigure the site connection with valid credentials.

… without allowing you to try again.

image

Solution 

The window that prompts for authentication is actually expected behavior but in order to be able to successfully authenticate with the remote vCenter whether it’s the protected or recovery site, you need to use the following format:

NetBIOS\username (contoso\someAdminAccount)

The connection should successfully establish once you use the format above to authenticate with the remote paired site.

1 comment:

Matt Mason said...

THANK YOU!!!! I have been pounding 6 inch nails into a concrete wall with my forehead over this issue...

Now if you could tell me why SRM 5 sucks so much I would be in a much better state!