Virtual Lifestyle

Site Recovery Manager: HP P4000 SRA “Failed to load SRA”

Feb 21, 2012 Blogs

Have you encountered the SRA Error “Failed to load SRA from ‘C:/Program Files (x86)/VMware/VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager/storage/sra/HP P4000 SRA’. SRA command ‘queryInfo’ didn’t return a response.“?

I have battled this error for about a week now, and only just found a solution.


I’ve tried a couple of things to fix this problem:

• Reinstalled the HP P4000 SRA like five times…
• Messed around with the settings for the SRM database; finally found “Install and Configure SQL Express 2005 for use with Site Recovery Manager V4” (it still works for SRM v5 and SQL Server 2008 R2 Express)
• Tried changing the account under which the SRM service runs (as suggested here)
• Tried forcibly setting the path for the temporary directory (VMware KB 1027218)

But none of these actually helped. I let the issue rest for a bit to clear my head. Today, I picked it up again. I dove right back in to the logs and noticed something odd. The SRA was outputting the following into SRM’s log files:

2012-02-21T15:17:44.631+01:00 [00508 error 'Storage'] queryInfo's stderr:
-->
--> Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load
file or assembly 'System.Core, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies.
The system cannot find the file specified.
--> File name: 'System.Core, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'
--> at HP.SRA.SRAProcessor.ProcessRequest(String[] args)
--> at HP.SRA.SRAProcessor.Main(String[] args)
-->

Somehow, the format and message seemed to indicate some sort of .NET error to me. I googled, and in fact discovered a lot of totally unrelated information about not having .NET installed.

So I went back to the two servers (both Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 SP1 VMs) and noticed that indeed .NET wasn’t installed. I quickly installed .NET, and hey presto, the SRA started working!

Well done HP for failing to add this pre-requisite to your documentation.

Update: HP does mention .NET 3.5 as a prerequisite in the document “SRAforVMwareSRMDeploymentGuide.pdf“, but in a somewhat confusing manner: “.Net 3.5 will be installed if not present“. Obviously, it doesn’t get installed automatically if not present.