You are probably wondering what I am talking about because the VMware Site Recovery Manager Service in the Windows Services manager runs as “Local System”.
The service account I am talking about is the one that is used by the SRM service to pair the sites together and to connect to vCenter. This is the account used for Credential Based Authentication.
I stumbled upon this after the VMware Site Recovery Manager service wouldn’t start. I looked in the log file located in the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Site Recovery Manager\Logs” directory. I opened the latest vmware-dr-x.log file and found this.
Failed to login to VC:
Unexpected MethodFault (vim.fault.InvalidLogin) {
dynamicType = <unset>,
msg =
“Login failed due to a bad username or password.”
As soon as I saw that in the log file I new what had happened. The admin that had installed SRM had changed his password.
I looked in the “Site Recovery Manager Administration Guide” and found a command line tool called srm-config.exe on page 86. On page 86 there is a section called “Reinitializing credential-based authentication after a user ID or password change“.
I created a new local administrator on both SRM servers named SRMAdmin, gave the account vCenter Administrator permissions and SRM Administrator permissions.
I then ran this command to change the account in SRM.
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Site Recovery Manager\bin>srm-config.exe -cmd updateuser -cfg ..\config\vmware-dr.xml -u SRMAdmin
After I ran this on both SRM servers I was able to start the service.
I then had to reconfigure the connection between the two SRM servers.
There isn’t really any recomendation in the admin guide about a dedicated account for SRM. The only reference to the fact that it even uses an account is on page 34 when it is talking about using Credential Based Authentication and on page 86 in the srm-config.exe section.
VMware should add this to their guide.
Jeremy Waldrop's Blog 
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