I noticed today that one of my two SRM servers wasn’t online in vCenter. I did some quick checking and found the service itself wasn’t running, and the last log entry was from seven days ago (the SRM log is located here “C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager\Logs”).

It has some info about it being shutdown, and it turns out that was our production patch cycle that rebooted the server. I checked ODBC, all was well, could manually connect to the database just fine. I also checked on the other SRM server, but it was 100%. I restarted both servers and nothing changed: one worked, the other didn’t.

I’m guessing since the service wouldn’t start, it wouldn’t update the log (which is why last write time was June 7th). The windows application log was unhelpful, and the system log only had the typical message

On a whim, I decided to delete the System ODBC connection and recreate it. After that, SRM started fine.

I’m still on version 5.0, no Update 1 yet. If I encounter this problem again, I’ll upgrade to Update 1 and see if it comes back.

Just thought I’d share.