Unable to create protection group. No VRM Server Registered with vCenter Server for site

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Unable to create Protection group in SRM while using vSphere Replication to replicate VMs.
• When creating Protection group in SRM after selecting vSphere Replication as the Protection group type, you see this error:
  "Unable to create protection group. No VRM Server Registered with vCenter Server for site 'vCenter FQDN'"
• Failed to create protection group. The VRM server registered with vCenter Server for site "XYZ" is not running.

Environment

VMware vSphere Replication 8.x
VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.x

Cause

VR uses host address with upper-cased address everywhere, including certificate, appliance hostname, VC extension, lookupservice registration. But according to VMware-dr.log, SRM trys to connect hms with lower-cased address, and fails.

This issue can also present itself if there's a time difference between these components:

• ESXi Host
• vCenter Server
• SRM Server
• vSphere Replication Appliance

Resolution

Refer to workaround

Workaround:

Try these steps in the order mentioned below and check if it works after each step. 
 

1. Check if the vCenter/VR/SRM/ESXi host is using a valid NTP server at both the sites. They must all be configured to sync with NTP or host but not a mix of both. 

2. Reconfigure VRMS with lowercase VR FQDN and reconnect site pair 

Additional Information

Additional steps that can be tried - 

1. When connecting to the target site in SRM, try using lower case target vCenter address or use the precise address in the lookup service registration (Copy the vCenter name from the target site as it is) & reconnect site pair. 

2. Register SRM & vSphere Replication appliance using IP address, if there are DNS issues that cannot be resolved.