SRM show disconnected on vCenter after vCenter upgrade/update

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

• After vCenter patching/upgrading, the SRM servers under site recovery management page show disconnected/unknown for Remote SRM connection.

• Upon verifying the SRM service state on SRM server, you may see the SRM server service is in stopped state. When starting service manually, it failed to start and would show the error as below.

root [ /opt/vmware/support/logs/dr ]# systemctl status srm-server
.srm-server. service - VMware Site Recovery Manager Server
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/srm-server.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: failed (Result: signal) since Tue 2026-01-20 04:03:48 UTC; 6min ago
Process: 2359482 ExecStart=/opt/vmware/srm/bin/vmware-dr /opt/vmware/srm/conf/vmware-dr.xml (code=killed, signal=ABRT)
Main PID: 2359482 (code=killed, signal=ABRT)

Jan 20 04:03:48 srm-server systemd[1]: srm-server. service: Main process exited, code=killed, status=6/ABRT
Jan 20 04:03:48 srm-server systemd[1]: srm-server. service: Failed with result 'signal'.
Jan 20 04:03:48 srm-server systemd[1]: Failed to start VMware Site Recovery Manager Server.
Jan 20 04:03:48 srm-server systemd[1]: srm-server. service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 3.
Jan 20 04:03:48 srm-server systemd[1]: Stopped VMware Site Recovery Manager Server.
Jan 20 04:03:48 srm-server systemd[1]: srm-server. service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Jan 20 04:03:48 srm-server systemd[1]: srm-server. service: Failed with result 'signal'.
Jan 20 04:03:48 srm-server systemd[1]: Failed to start VMware Site Recovery Manager Server.

Environment

• VMware Live Recovery 9.0.2

Cause

• The issue is seen when the SRM site is missing license and shows "Unlicensed". If you validate the license, one of the site may show "Unlicensed"

• You can validate this under licensing section on vCenter as below.

Resolution

1. In order to resolve the issue, we need to apply the license for the site showing "Unlicensed".

2. You may refer the instructions in the KB article How to Install and Activate the VMware Live Site Recovery (formerly Site Recovery Manager) License Key for fixing the license.

3. Fixing the license and starting the SRM service on SRM server is expected to start the issue and resolve connectivity issues with vCenter server.