How do I rename the “Site Name” of a VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) site?

The weekend that just past was nothing short of eventful as I was a part of a datacenter move.  Many things that shouldn’t have gone wrong did and before I knew it, I’ve been up for 34 hours before finally making my way home.  One of the servers that failed was the vCenter collocated with SRM so one of the tasks I had was to rebuild SRM with the most recent databases recoverable.  While there isn’t a document that clearly shows how to rebuild SRM, I did manage to find migration guide with procedures that are similar to what I need to do so I used it as a guideline to rebuild SRM.  The steps were difficult but upon completing the rebuild, I found that I was not able to create any Protection Groups in the protected site.

After exhausting all of my options of rescanning the datastores, reconfiguring the array managers and other operations I was able to think of, I noticed that the Site Name for the protected site that I recovered was incorrect.  The screenshots I have provided below need to have the names blocked out so what I’ll do is use some bogus names to demonstrate what I mean:

Old Site Name of the Protected Site before SRM had to get rebuilt: SVR-VC02.contoso.com

New Site Name of the Protected Site after SRM was rebuilt: Site Recovery for SVR-VC02.contoso.com

The name is obviously incorrect and while I was able to find a reference to the name in the vmware-dr.xml file, I was a bit hesitate to try to do a hack job and modify it.  Seeing how I’ve exhausted all the possible steps I could think of, I gave VMware support a call.  I let the engineer perform his checks and after seeing how we weren’t really getting anywhere, I raised the incorrect name for the site.  The engineer initially said it was just cosmetics but as soon as he started running out of ideas, we went ahead and completed the following to change it:

Go to the directory:

C:Program Files (x86)VMwareVMware vCenter Site Recovery Managerconfig <— x64 bit OS

C:Program FilesVMwareVMware vCenter Site Recovery Managerconfig <— x86 bit OS

… and open the vmware-dr.xml file with Notepad.

Scroll down to the end of the file and locate the following line:

<SiteName>Some Site Name</SiteName>

Proceed with changing the name to the value you would like and save the XML file.

Once the changes have been made to the XML file, continue by performing a repair via the Programs and Features window:

Once the repair completes, you will now notice that the new name is reflected.  I’ll be writing another post with  more details about what the difference in name effects sometime during the next few days.