Because I promised my colleagues to demonstrate SRM later today I wanted to make sure everything is working properly (as it should be and was for many weeks).

So I logged in to the Web Clients and clicked on the Site Recovery Manager Extension.

I wanted to perform a recovery and failback of some test VM’s, but noticed a message:
“getAttribute: Session already invalidated”

I also noticed that there was no connection to the SRM server from my recovery site. I searched google first (offcourse) and found exactly one blog mentioning this issue is resolved by rebooting the vCenter server.

I don’t like solutions like this and because I have a vCenter environment where vCenter Server, Web Client, SSO, inventory service and SRM are installed on different nodes. I thought it would be wise to just restart the VMware vSphere Web Client Service.

After I’ve restarted the service I logged back into the web client and now the Site Recovery Manager Extension is not loaded!!! WTF?

After searching on the web I found out this could be related to browser cache. So I cleared the cache, and tried it again. Result: Still no Site Recovery Extension Manager. Then I checked the release notes and noticed the following:

Site Recovery Manager plugin does not display in the vSphere Web Client if Site Recovery Manager service stops.
After you install Site Recovery Manager and the service stops for any reason, the vSphere Web Client does not display the Site Recovery Manager plugin.Workaround: Restart the vSphere Web Client.

First thing I checked was the status of the SRM service. It was running. Just to be sure I restarted the service, restarted the VMware vSphere Web Client Service again and logged back into the web client. Unfortunately still no Site Recovery Manager Extension.

No I started to sweat, In a couple of hours I needed to demonstrate SRM to my colleagues.

I restarted the vCenter Server service and VMware vSphere Web Client Service. Still no luck.

I decided to reboot the SRM server and again the VMware vSphere Web Client Service. I logged in to the web client and HAPPINESS, the Site Recovery Manager Extension is there again. And the message about the getAtribbute is gone!!!

I performed a failover and failback and now I’m ready to give the demonstration to my colleagues.