I assisted a colleague today with an issue with reinstalling Site Recovery Manager 5.8 for a customer.  During installation, when requested to input the vCenter FQDN and administrative user, an “unexpected error: -1” pop up would occur.  After a bit of research, I found articles pointing to various certificate problems in SRM 4.X and 5.X.  The odd thing was he attempted to point it to the second vCenter server, and it would proceed, but this was the SRM server for one site, and this vCenter was in another.

I’ve been cognizant new vCenter releases disabling SSLv3, so we checked the build numbers of the two vCenter servers.  Sure enough, the one generating the error was 5.5.Update 3b which disabled SSLv3 support, but the vCenter that didn’t generate the error was 5.5 Update 2, which still supports SSLv3.  We then checked the build of the SRM 5.8 installation file, which was 5.8, NOT 5.8.1.  While this isn’t the same error, it states the fact that SRM 5.8.1 is required to interoperate well with vCenter 5.5 Update 3b, unless you want to enable SSLv3 in your vSphere environment, which isn’t the best thing for security. Even the interoperability guide shows that 5.8.0 as unsupported with vCenter 5.5 Update 3.

Apparently, the customer upgraded one vCenter very recently, but not the other, and also didn’t check SRM interoperability before doing so, which caused the weird behavior.   They also didn’t mention this to us.  vCenter in the second site was upgraded, and SRM 5.8.1 was installed instead of 5.8.0, and this resolved the issue.

So, if you have this error during SRM installation, it’s likely a problem with certificates, so start there, and be cognizant of any changes that might impact certificates or their use.  As always, check your builds, the interoperability matrix, and the upgrade order prior to updating any vSphere component.