Reuse old Appliance with Upgrade to modern Site Recovery ASR Appliance in Preview

Question

I tried upgrading to the new modern ASR Appliance which I created a new Windows VM using the OVA download from Azure.
I then migrated all of our VMs to the modern Appliance and vault.
Now, I'm trying to get the old software off of my old appliance (Win2k16), to reuse it by breaking the relationship with the old vault and upgrade to the latest.
I've manually gone through, uninstalled and deleted everything off of the old appliance. I deleted it from the old vault, removed all the IIS features and ASR packages from the Windows Server. I then used the PowerShell method to install the latest ASR software which is successful. I then reboot and start the config manager, which is all successful untll the very end, when I've run into a few different errors. The common theme with all of them is that somehow it is still tied to Azure in some behind the scenes way that I have no control over. It says things like "The resource already exists." But this is on a brand new vault. So somehow Azure doesn't actually release the old one all the way somewhere.
It doesn't show in any of the lists in any of the vault ASR appliances lists, but one clue is that it says I have 1 appliance setup on the vault in the header info. But there isn't one actually listed.
So it's like partially registered.
It seems there is a bug with the preview in not showing the appliances that are partially registered, or not completely "unregistered".

Has anyone else seen this?

Answer 1

We did get this solved.
I believe I could have solved this without a ticket, but there were some very specific actions I had to take to get this working, and no way in the world I could have guessed it.

There also were 2 important details about the new vaults that I learned.
First, you cannot migrate "Azure Backup" to new vaults. You can only migrate "Azure Site Recovery" to new vaults.

Second, once you attempt to add a Site Recovery install on a VM to a vault, if it partially installs at all, it will add it in Azure in the background where you can't see it. The only place you can tell is when you choose to add a new ASR, the count of how many ASR's are already installed in the vault will go up. Mine showed there were 4 installed in the 'Add new ASR' screen, but only 1 was actually fully registered. This becomes important later in the install with the "Friendly name of the VM".

Steps to reuse my old ASR with a new vault using modern ASR.

1. Uninstall all Azure Site Recovery software off of the old VM. This was around 10 or so apps.
2. Rename Registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Azure Site Recovery to something else
3. Clean the previous http config from old deployment: Run on cmd/powershell as administrator: "netsh http delete sslcert ipport=0.0.0.0:443"
4. Reboot
5. Download and run the Powershell script from the new Azure Site Recovery vault, New ASR
6. Reboot
7. Start the configuration program on the desktop. You have to either disable the dumb Internet Explorer advance security junk, or just use Chrome. Even if you use IE, it screws up opening up new tabs when you authenticate. Chrome works better.
8. During configuration, you must do the following:

• You must use a unique "Friendly name" of the ASR VM. You cannot use a name that has previously ever been used in Azure Site Recovery. This was my biggest hang up.
• You must also use the Exact same vCenter "Friendly name" as the working ASR. If you name it slightly different it will error out. This was my 2nd biggest hang up.

This all worked finally. The biggest issues were the "Friendly names" of the ASR VM (needs to unique) and vCenter (needs to be exactly the same), and clearing the sslcert.

Thanks to Microsoft Azure support team for all their help.

Answer 2

Hello @Eric Miller

Thank you for your heads up.

I would say that if that is the case, I am wondering if you try to enable "Enable Replication" option is the ASR stated before being reflected....

Have you tried it like that?

Looking forward to your feedback,

Cheers,

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